TY - GEN
T1 - Deconstructing the 2017 changes to AWS spot market pricing
AU - Baughman, Matt
AU - Caton, Simon
AU - Haas, Christian
AU - Chard, Ryan
AU - Wolski, Rich
AU - Foster, Ian
AU - Chard, Kyle
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1550588 and 1816611 and by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. This work also used compute resources provided by Jetstream [17] through the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) [20], which is supported by National Science Foundation grant ACI-1548562.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
PY - 2019/6/17
Y1 - 2019/6/17
N2 - The Amazon Web Services spot market sells excess computing capacity at a reduced price and with reduced reliability guarantees. The low cost nature of the spot market has led to widespread adoption in industry and science. However, one of the challenges with using the spot market is that it is intentionally opaque and thus users have little understanding of the underlying dynamics. In late 2017, the mechanisms underlying the spot market were significantly altered-no longer are bid prices used to clear capacity and as a result the pricing is much less volatile. In this paper, we revisit prior work with the aim to analyze the differences in market dynamics between the pre-change and post-change spot instance market. We then use these analyses to highlight possible properties of the current and previous pricing algorithms, including artificial manipulation, dynamic algorithm adjustment, and persistent trends in market supply, demand, and pricing.
AB - The Amazon Web Services spot market sells excess computing capacity at a reduced price and with reduced reliability guarantees. The low cost nature of the spot market has led to widespread adoption in industry and science. However, one of the challenges with using the spot market is that it is intentionally opaque and thus users have little understanding of the underlying dynamics. In late 2017, the mechanisms underlying the spot market were significantly altered-no longer are bid prices used to clear capacity and as a result the pricing is much less volatile. In this paper, we revisit prior work with the aim to analyze the differences in market dynamics between the pre-change and post-change spot instance market. We then use these analyses to highlight possible properties of the current and previous pricing algorithms, including artificial manipulation, dynamic algorithm adjustment, and persistent trends in market supply, demand, and pricing.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85069160736&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85069160736&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3322795.3331465
DO - 10.1145/3322795.3331465
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85069160736
T3 - ScienceCloud 2019 - Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing, co-located with HPDC 2019
SP - 19
EP - 26
BT - ScienceCloud 2019 - Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing, co-located with HPDC 2019
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 10th Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing, ScienceCloud 2019, co-located with HPDC 2019
Y2 - 25 June 2019
ER -