Reducing Costs of Spot Instances via Checkpointing in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Sangho Yi (1) , Derrick Kondo (1) , Artur Andrzejak (2)

1 MESCAL - Middleware efficiently scalable
2 ZIB - Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin

Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer lower resource costs in exchange for reduced reliability; these instances can be revoked abruptly due to price and demand fluctuations. Mechanisms and tools that deal with the cost-reliability trade-offs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while maintaining high reliability. We study how one such a mechanism, namely checkpointing, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based on the real price history of EC2 spot instances, we compare several adaptive checkpointing schemes in terms of monetary costs and improvement of job completion times. Trace-based simulations show that our approach can reduce significantly both price and the task completion times.

Keywords: Cloud Computing; Spot Instances; Amazon EC2; Fault-tolerance; Reliability

Domains: Performance [cs.PF]; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC]

Sangho Yi, Derrick Kondo, Artur Andrzejak. Reducing Costs of Spot Instances via Checkpointing in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. 2010. ⟨hal-00464222⟩