A survey on preemptible IaaS cloud instances: challenges, issues, opportunities, and advantages

Abstract

Despite the popularity and widespread usage of cloud computing, the cost of resources is one of the most important issues in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Therefore, dynamic pricing models presented by some IaaS service providers, offers considerable price savings on spot instances or low-priority virtual machines. This significant discount has increased the popularity of using such resources among users. However, some of the most important Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as reliability and availability are eliminated by obtaining this discount. For instance, the availability criterion is influenced by issues such as the user’s bid, supply, and demand rate of that specific instance, etc. In this paper, an extensive survey has been conducted on the issue of cloud preemptible instances, and the challenges in this context are studied. Furthermore, we point out the challenges that have not yet been investigated and define future directions in this research area.