Methods for improving the availability of spot instances: A survey

Abstract

The burgeoning development of the cloud market has promoted the expansion of resources held by cloud providers, but the resulting underutilization caused by the over-provisioned resources has become a challenge. To improve the utilization of these resources, in November 2009, AWS (Amazon Web services) first introduces an auction mechanism to provide users with these temporarily idle resources, which are named spot instances. After decades of development, AWS spot instance has become the largest public infrastructure with dynamic pricing based on the supply and demand of instance market resources. Other major cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) have also introduced their spot-like instances. These instances are sold in a pay-as-you-go way at much lower prices than on-demand instances with the same configuration. Such price advantages have quickly attracted the attention of users needing a lot of computing resources. However, the availability of spot instances cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, methods for improving the availability of spot instances have been widely discussed. This paper presents a survey on the work related to spot instances, by first introducing the development history of spot instance pricing models, then summarizing the methods that can improve the availability of spot instances, and finally discussing how to better understand and use spot instances. We hope that cloud users can obtain enough knowledge in this article to be able to use spot instances from various cloud providers to provide themselves with cheap and stable computing resources.