Reducing Costs of Spot Instances via Checkpointing in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

摘要

Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer lower 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 trade-offs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while keeping reliability at a high level. We study how one such a mechanism, namely checkpointing, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based on the real price history of the spot instances we compare several adaptive checkpointing schemes in terms of monetary costs and improvement of job completion times. A trace-based simulation shows that our approach can reduce significantly both the price and the task completion time.