Cloud spot instance price forecasting multi-headed models tuned using modified PSO

Abstract

The increasing dependence and demands on cloud infrastructure have brought to light challenges associated with cloud instance pricing. The often unpredictable nature of demand as well as changing costs of supplying a reliable instance can leave companies struggling to appropriately budget to support a healthy cash flow while maintaining operating costs. This work explores the potential of multi-headed recurrent architectures to forecast cloud instance prices based on historical and instance data. Two architectures are explored, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks. A modified optimizer is introduced and tested on a publicly available Amazon elastic compute cloud dataset. The GRU model, enhanced by the proposed modified approach, had the most impressive outcomes with an MAE score of 0.000801. Results have undergone meticulous statistical validation with the best-performing models further analyzed using explainable artificial intelligence techniques to provide further insight into model reasoning and information on feature importance.