Application-centric Resource Provisioning for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

摘要

In late 2009, Amazon introduced spot instances to offer their unusedresources at lower cost with reduced reliability. Amazon's spot instances allowcustomers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for aslong as their bid exceeds the current spot price. The spot price changesperiodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed itgain access to the available spot instances. Customers may expect theirservices at lower cost with spot instances compared to on-demand or reserved.However the reliability is compromised since the instances(IaaS) providing theservice(SaaS) may become unavailable at any time without any notice to thecustomer. Checkpointing and migration schemes are of great use to cope withsuch situation. In this paper we study various checkpointing schemes that canbe used with spot instances. Also we device some algorithms for checkpointingscheme on top of application-centric resource provisioning framework thatincrease the reliability while reducing the cost significantly.