A Resilient Auction Framework for Deadline-Aware Jobs in Cloud Spot Market

Abstract

Public cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2, offer idle computing resources known as spot instances at a much cheaper rate compared to On-Demand instances. Spot instance prices are set dynamically according to market demand. Cloud users request spot instances by submitting their bid, and if user's bid price exceeds current spot price then a spot instance is assigned to that user. The problem however is that while spot instances are executing their jobs, they can be revoked whenever the spot price rises above the current bid of the user. In such scenarios and to complete jobs reliably, we propose a set of improvements for the cloud spot market which benefits both the provider and users. Typically, the new framework allows users to bid different prices depending on their perceived urgency and nature of the running job. Hence, it practically allow them to negotiate the current bid price in a way that guarantees the timely completion of their jobs. To complement our intuition, we have conducted an empirical study using real cloud spot price traces to evaluate our framework strategies which aim to achieve a resilient deadline-aware auction framework.