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An Empirical Analysis of Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Features Affecting Cost-effective Resource Procurement

Published: 17 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Many cost-conscious public cloud workloads ("tenants") are turning to Amazon EC2's spot instances because, on average, these instances offer significantly lower prices (up to 10 times lower) than on-demand and reserved instances of comparable advertized resource capacities. To use spot instances effectively, a tenant must carefully weigh the lower costs of these instances against their poorer availability. Towards this, we empirically study four features of EC2 spot instance operation that a cost-conscious tenant may find useful to model. Using extensive evaluation based on both historical and current spot instance data, we show shortcomings in the state-of-the-art modeling of these features that we overcome. Our analysis reveals many novel properties of spot instance operation some of which offer predictive value while others do not. Using these insights, we design predictors for our features that offer a balance between computational efficiency (allowing for online resource procurement) and cost-efficacy. We explore "case studies" wherein we implement prototypes of dynamic spot instance procurement advised by our predictors for two types of workloads. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach achieves (i) comparable cost but much better performance (fewer bid failures) for a latency-sensitive in-memory Memcached cache, and (ii) an additional 18% cost-savings with comparable (if not better than) performance for a delay-tolerant batch workload.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ICPE '17: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering
      April 2017
      450 pages
      ISBN:9781450344043
      DOI:10.1145/3030207
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      Published: 17 April 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. resource procurement
      2. spot instance features

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      • IBM faculty partnership award
      • NSF career award

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      ICPE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 83 submissions, 33%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 252 of 851 submissions, 30%

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      • (2024)An Online Algorithm Based on Replication for Using Spot Instances in IaaS CloudsJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-023-1535-439:1(103-115)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
      • (2022)SpotLake: Diverse Spot Instance Dataset Archive Service2022 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC)10.1109/IISWC55918.2022.00029(242-255)Online publication date: Nov-2022
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      • (2020)Amazon EC2 Spot Price Prediction Using Regression Random ForestsIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2017.27801598:1(59-72)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2020
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      • (2018)Perceptive bidding strategy for Amazon EC2 spot instance marketMultiagent and Grid Systems10.3233/MGS-18028214:1(83-102)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2018
      • (2018)Cloud Index TrackingProceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3267809.3267821(451-463)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
      • (2018)An Empirical Analysis of Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Features Affecting Cost-Effective Resource ProcurementACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems10.1145/31645383:2(1-24)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2018
      • (2018)Performance and Behavior Characterization of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD)10.1109/CLOUD.2018.00017(73-81)Online publication date: Jul-2018
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