TY - GEN
T1 - Deconstructing Amazon EC2 spot instance pricing
AU - Ben-Yehuda, Orna Agmon
AU - Ben-Yehuda, Muli
AU - Schuster, Assaf
AU - Tsafrir, Dan
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Cloud providers possessing large quantities of spare capacity must either incentivize clients to purchase it or suffer losses. Amazon is the first cloud provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a periodically changing spot price. Amazon publicizes the spot price but does not disclose how it is determined. By analyzing the spot price histories of Amazon's EC2 cloud, we reverse engineer how prices are set and construct a model that generates prices consistent with existing price traces. We find that prices are usually not market-driven as sometimes previously assumed. Rather, they are typically generated at random from within a tight price interval via a dynamic hidden reserve price. Our model could help clients make informed bids, cloud providers design profitable systems, and researchers design pricing algorithms.
AB - Cloud providers possessing large quantities of spare capacity must either incentivize clients to purchase it or suffer losses. Amazon is the first cloud provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a periodically changing spot price. Amazon publicizes the spot price but does not disclose how it is determined. By analyzing the spot price histories of Amazon's EC2 cloud, we reverse engineer how prices are set and construct a model that generates prices consistent with existing price traces. We find that prices are usually not market-driven as sometimes previously assumed. Rather, they are typically generated at random from within a tight price interval via a dynamic hidden reserve price. Our model could help clients make informed bids, cloud providers design profitable systems, and researchers design pricing algorithms.
KW - Amazon EC2
KW - Cloud
KW - Spot instance
KW - Spot price
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84857154371&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/CloudCom.2011.48
DO - 10.1109/CloudCom.2011.48
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84857154371
SN - 9780769546223
T3 - Proceedings - 2011 3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2011
SP - 304
EP - 311
BT - Proceedings - 2011 3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2011
T2 - 2011 3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2011
Y2 - 29 November 2011 through 1 December 2011
ER -