November 16, Wednesday 14:15, Room 303, Jacobs Building
Title: Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing
Lecturer: Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda
Lecturer homepage
: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ladypine/
Affiliation : Department of Computer Science, Technion
Cloud providers possessing large quantities of spare capacity must either
incentivize clients to purchase it or suffer losses. Amazon is the first cloud
provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare
capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a
periodically changing spot price. Amazon publicizes the spot price but does not
disclose how it is determined.
By analyzing the spot price histories of Amazon's EC2 cloud, we reverse engineer
how prices are set and construct a model that generates prices consistent with
existing price traces. We find that prices are usually not market-driven as
sometimes previously assumed. Rather, they are typically generated at random
from within a tight price interval via a dynamic hidden reserve price. Our
model could help clients make informed bids, cloud providers design profitable
systems, and researchers design pricing algorithms.
Joint work with Muli Ben-Yehuda, Assaf Schuster, Dan Tsafrir. Technion CS Tech
Report CS-2011-09.