A survey on optimal utilization of preemptible VM instances in cloud computing

Abstract

In this article, an extensive survey on optimal utilization of preemptible instances in cloud is presented. Different techniques used in state-of-the-art research for efficient utilization of spot instances have been classified and categorized in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of its kind. With the continuing growths in cloud computing, researchers and business personnels are exploiting the services provided by the cloud computing to reduce their operational cost. Users can share resources in the cloud with the help of virtualization. Virtualization provides abstraction of cloud to the users by hiding the complexity of inherent software and hardware present in the cloud. It increases the likelihood of running multiple operating systems (OSs) on a single physical machine with sharing of hardware resources. Each OS can be considered as a virtual machine (VM) installed on a physical machine. Based on subscription model, VMs can be classified into three types: reserved VMs, on-demand VMs and spot VMs. Spot instances are also known as preemptible VM instances. Spot instances are used as reduced cost resources at the risk of reliability. To utilize spot instances, users have to bid for them. Users will able to get the spot instances only if the biding price is greater than the spot instance price. As soon as the bid price becomes less than the spot price, the cloud provider will revoke the VMs (SIs). This survey aims to find the ways, one can efficiently utilize spot instances for executing the tasks with optimized cost and time.