Abstract Maximizing resource utilization by performing an efficient resource provisioning is a key factor for any cloud provider: commercial actors can maximize their revenues, whereas scientific and non-commercial providers can maximize their infrastructure utilization. Traditionally, batch systems have allowed data centers to fill their resources as much as possible by using backfilling and similar techniques. However, in an IaaS cloud, where virtual machines are supposed to live indefinitely, or at least as long as the user is able to pay for them, these policies are not easily implementable. In this work we present a new scheduling algorithm for IaaS providers that is able to support preemptible instances, that can be stopped by higher priority requests without introducing large modifications in the current cloud schedulers. This scheduler enables the implementation of new cloud usage and payment models that allow more efficient usage of the resources and potential new revenue sources for commercial providers. We also study the correctness and the performance overhead of the proposed scheduler against existing solutions.
Regarding Big Data analysis, several authors have studied how the usage of Spot Instances could be used to execute MapReduce workloads reducing the monetary costs, such as in @cite_4 @cite_32 . The usage of Spot Instances for opportunistic computing is another usage that has awaken a lot of interest, especially regarding the design of an optimal bidding algorithm that would reduce the costs for the users @cite_15 @cite_20 . There are already existing applications such as the vCluster framework @cite_35 that can consume resources from heterogeneous cloud infrastructures in a fashion that could take advantage of the lower price that the Spot Instances should provide.
@cite_35 @cite_4 @cite_32 @cite_15 @cite_20
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Cloud computing providers are now offering their unused resources for leasing in the spot market, which has been considered the first step towards a full-fledged market economy for computational resources. Spot instances are virtual machines (VMs) available at lower prices than their standard on-demand counterparts. These VMs will run for as long as the current price is lower than the maximum bid price users are willing to pay per hour. Spot instances have been increasingly used for executing compute-intensive applications. In spite of an apparent economical advantage, due to an intermittent nature of biddable resources, application execution times may be prolonged or they may not finish at all. This paper proposes a resource allocation strategy that addresses the problem of running compute-intensive jobs on a pool of intermittent virtual machines, while also aiming to run applications in a fast and economical way. To mitigate potential unavailability periods, a multifaceted fault-aware resource provisioning policy is proposed. Our solution employs price and runtime estimation mechanisms, as well as three fault-tolerance techniques, namely check pointing, task duplication and migration. We evaluate our strategies using trace-driven simulations, which take as input real price variation traces, as well as an application trace from the Parallel Workload Archive. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of executing applications on spot instances, respecting QoS constraints, despite occasional failures. Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer low resource costs in exchange for reduced reliability; these instances can be revoked abruptly due to price and demand fluctuations. Mechanisms and tools that deal with the cost-reliability tradeoffs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while maintaining high reliability. We study how mechanisms, namely, checkpointing and migration, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based on the real price history of EC2 spot instances, we compare several adaptive checkpointing schemes in terms of monetary costs and improvement of job completion times. We evaluate schemes that apply predictive methods for spot prices. Furthermore, we also study how work migration can improve task completion in the midst of failures while maintaining low monetary costs. Trace-based simulations show that our schemes can reduce significantly both monetary costs and task completion times of computation on spot instance. 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. Amazon introduced Spot Instance Market to utilize the idle resources of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) more efficiently. The price of a spot instance changes dynamically according to the current supply and demand for cloud resources. Users can bid for a spot instance and the job request will be granted if the current spot price falls below the bid, whereas the job will be terminated if the spot price exceeds the bid. In this paper, we investigate the problem of designing a bidding strategy from a cloud service broker's perspective, where the cloud service broker accepts job requests from cloud users, and leverages the opportunistic yet less expensive spot instances for computation in order to maximize its own profit. In this context, we propose a profit aware dynamic bidding (PADB) algorithm, which observes the current spot price and selects the bid adaptively to maximize the time average profit of the cloud service broker. We show that our bidding strategy achieves a near-optimal solution, i.e., (1−∈) of the optimal solution to the profit maximization problem, where ∈ can be arbitrarily small. The proposed dynamic bidding algorithm is self-adaptive and requires no a priori statistical knowledge on the distribution of random job sizes from cloud users.