A Study on Cloud Cost Efficiency by Exploiting Idle Billing Period Fractions

In most of the current commercial Clouds, resources are billed based on a time interval equal to one hour, as is the case of virtual machine (VM) instances on Amazon EC2. Such time interval is usually long, and yet the user has to pay for the whole last hour, even if he/she has only used a fraction of it, contradicting the pay-as-you-go model of Clouds. In this paper, we analyse the advantages of adopting alternative scheduling policies that exploit idle last time intervals, in terms of service cost to Cloud users and operating costs to Cloud providers. Using a real-life astronomy workflow application, constrained by user-defined Deadline and Budget quality of service (QoS) parameters, a set of online state-of-the-art-based scheduling algorithms try different execution and resource provisioning plans. Our results show that exploitation of partially idle last time intervals can reduce the cost of service to the end user, and augments providers competitiveness up to 21.6% through energy efficiency improvement and consequent lowering of operational costs.