Abstract
In cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, users can reserve IaaS instances rather than buy on-demand ones to save cost. But it would incur the waste of reservations if there are few demands arriving after reserving instances. Currently, there is a reserved instance marketplace launched by Amazon EC2 cloud, where users can sell their unused instances for avoiding such waste of unused reservations. But for users, it is difficult to make the decision to sell their instances optimally without knowing any information for future demands, for it would incur the extra cost when there are new demands arriving after selling their reservations. For solving this problem, an online selling algorithm is proposed in this paper to guide cloud users in selling reserved instances in Amazon EC2 marketplace. We prove theoretically that our online algorithm Aβ can guarantee a bounded competitive ratio of 2T/β, whose value is specific to the type of reserved instances. Taking the i3.large instance provided by Amazon EC2 as an example, the competitive ratio is 3.36 under its pricing rules for 1-year term. Finally, via extensive experiments using workload data collected from actual applications, we verify our online algorithm's effectiveness and demonstrate that it is much more cost effective to cloud users in IaaS platforms.
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