Conference proceeding
The Price Is (Not) Right: Reflections on Pricing for Transient Cloud Servers
2019 28th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), Vol.2019-, pp.1-9
07/2019
DOI: 10.1109/ICCCN.2019.8846933
Abstract
Amazon introduced spot instances in December 2009, enabling ``customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price.'' Amazon's real-time computational spot market was novel in multiple respects. For example, it was the first (and to date only) large-scale public implementation of market-based resource allocation based on dynamic pricing after decades of research, and it provided users with useful information, control knobs, and options for optimizing the cost of running cloud applications. Spot instances also introduced the concept of transient cloud servers derived from variable idle capacity that cloud platforms could revoke at any time. Transient servers have since become central to efficient resource management of modern clusters and clouds. As a result, Amazon's spot market was the motivation for substantial research over the past decade. Yet, in November 2017, Amazon effectively ended its realtime spot market by announcing that users no longer needed to place bids and that spot prices will ``...adjust more gradually, based on longer-term trends in supply and demand.'' The changes made spot instances more similar to the fixed-price transient servers offered by other cloud platforms. Unfortunately, while these changes made spot instances less complex, they eliminated many benefits to sophisticated users in optimizing their applications. This paper provides a retrospective on Amazon's real-time spot market, including its advantages and disadvantages for allocating transient servers compared to current fixed-price approaches. We also discuss some fundamental problems with Amazon's spot market, which we identified in prior work (from 2016), that predicted its eventual end. We then discuss potential options for allocating transient servers that combine the advantages of Amazon's real-time spot market, while also addressing the problems that likely led to its elimination.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The Price Is (Not) Right: Reflections on Pricing for Transient Cloud Servers
- Creators
- David Irwin - University of Massachusetts AmherstPrashant Shenoy - University of Massachusetts AmherstPradeep Ambati - University of Massachusetts AmherstPrateek Sharma - Teagasc - The Irish Agriculture and Food Development AuthoritySupreeth Shastri - The University of Texas at AustinAhmed Ali-Eldin - University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- 2019 28th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), Vol.2019-, pp.1-9
- Publisher
- IEEE
- DOI
- 10.1109/ICCCN.2019.8846933
- ISSN
- 1095-2055
- eISSN
- 2637-9430
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/2019
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science
- Record Identifier
- 9984259479402771
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