Constructing Reliable Computing Environments on Top of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Cloud provider Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) gives access to resources in the form of virtual servers, also known as instances. EC2 spot instances (SIs) offer spare computational capacity at steep discounts compared to reliable and fixed price on-demand instances. The drawback, however, is that the delay in acquiring spots can be incredible high. Moreover, SIs may not always be available as they can be reclaimed by EC2 at any given time, with a two-minute interruption notice. In this paper, we propose a multi-workflow scheduling algorithm, allied with a container migration-based mechanism, to dynamically construct and readjust virtual clusters on top of non-reserved EC2 pricing model instances. Our solution leverages recent findings on performance and behavior characteristics of EC2 spots. We conducted simulations by submitting real-life workflow applications, constrained by user-defined deadline and budget quality of service (QoS) parameters. The results indicate that our solution improves the rate of completed tasks by almost 20%, and the rate of completed workflows by at least 30%, compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, for a worse-case scenario.