Utility-Based Strategy for Balanced Cost and Availability at the Cloud Spot Market

In the Amazon EC2 cloud provider, the price of spot instances is much lower than on demand instances, however, at the cost of availability issues of the former. Recently, several strategies were proposed to analyze the Amazon EC2 spot pricing model employing techniques such as statistical and probabilistic modeling and neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work in the literature that can accurately capture the trade-off between price and availability in favor of user decision-making. In this work, we propose and evaluate a utility-based strategy that balances spot instance cost and availability to Amazon EC2 users. Our experiments show that the average availability reaches up to 98% for spot instances, using data gathered from Amazon (September to November 2016), and a bid value below 28% of the on demand price for the m4.10xlarge general purpose instance type.