Spot Hopping: Increasing Reliability and Reducing Cost

Abstract

Cost reduction is one of the attractive features offered by the cloud. Spot leasing is one way to reduce the cost even more. Spot leasing is done by leasing the unused excess instances with low price. Spot instances are facing risks that minimize their availability and reliability. Risks including instances reclaiming and dynamic price changing. Minimizing the risks associated with the spot leasing is going to help in increasing the utilization of the spot instances, which in turn is going to attract more users. In this paper, a framework has been proposed to mitigate the instances reclaiming risk while reducing the leasing cost as possible. This is done by monitoring many markets and hopping between instances. The proposed framework has been evaluated through simulating using actual data for EC2 spot price history collected from Amazon web services. The proposed framework has scored 74% and 64% of cost reduction compared with on-demand and spot leasing schemes accordingly.