I searched the web to find some differences between spot and on-demand instances, and the issues that rise when making a choice between those two:
- Found on this website: Wouldn’t it be the cheapest to choose only spot instances and set a price equal to the on-demand instance prices? In theory, our pricing should never be worse than what we pay currently and would most likely be much better. The problems with these techniques: all your instances may get terminated at the same time as the price rises above on-demand (which it already did).
- Found in this article "An introduction to Spot Instances" by Amazon: it is a tutorial that tells you step-by-step how to use spot instances through the AWS Management Console. It states as well for what kind of applications (with concrete examples) spot instances are useful:
Spot Instances are well suited to a number of different kinds of applications. In general, they can save you money if your application doesn’t depend on instances being started immediately, can start and perform useful work without manual intervention, and can resume work after being interrupted.
Finally, there are a number of best practices that are good to keep in mind when running applications on Spot Instances in order to minimize the potentials impact from your instance being interrupted: save your work frequently (add checkpoints/split up your work), test your application, minimize group instance launches, track when spot instances start and stop and access large pools of compute capacity.
- Found on this website: "I think this means that over time people will realize that spot instances are feasible for a wide variety of workloads. There will be a psychological barrier for a while, but it will be overcome eventually." Why not just bid the on-demand price? "The fact that Amazon controls the spot price, still doesn't change the fact that unless there is a capacity problem with on-demand, people don't have any reason for bidding more than the on-demand price." "If everyone adopted your idea and bid at the on-demand price, that would invariably drive the spot pricing up to equal the on-demand... and then what have we gained?" "AWS spot price *may* be determined by supply and demand, but doesn't have to be. This is because there is only one seller."
I also read the following paper: "Optimal Virtual Machine Placement across Multiple Cloud Providers" by Chaisiri S., Lee B. and Niyato D. (I have to admit I did not yet fully understand the mathematics behind the presented model):
ABSTRACT Cloud computing provides users an efficient way to dynamically allocate computing resources to meet demands. Cloud providers can offer users two payment plans, i.e., reservation and on-demand plans for resource provisioning. Price of resources in reservation plan is generally cheaper than that in on-demand plan. However, since the reservation plan has to be acquired in advance, it may not fully meet future demands in which the on-demand plan can be used to guarantee the availability to the user. In this paper, we propose an optimal virtual machine placement (OVMP) algorithm. This algorithm can minimize the cost spending in each plan for hosting virtual machines in a multiple cloud provider environment under future demand and price uncertainty. OVMP algorithm makes a decision based on the optimal solution of stochastic integer programming (SIP) to rent resources from cloud providers. The performance of OVMP algorithm is evaluated by numerical studies and simulation. The results clearly show that the proposed OVMP algorithm can minimize users’ budgets. This algorithm can be applied to provision resources in emerging cloud computing environments.
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