Performance and Behavior Characterization of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Amazon EC2's spot instances (SIs) represent a competitive Cloud resource in terms of price compared to reliable and fixed price options. The drawback, however, is that SIs may not always be available and they can be revoked at any given time. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive experimental evaluation for EC2 SIs to characterize their performance and behavior in three different regions each of which in a different continent. We describe the life cycle of SIs with the most important phases of an SI, introduce the most relevant events that can prevent a user from obtaining SIs, and draw important conclusions that can be exploited by the research community to effectively use the spot market. Our results reveal the fulfillment rate of requests for SIs, waiting time until requested SIs become fulfilled, details about the frequency of SI interruption, and how long SIs run before being interrupted. Our study also indicates that the SI frequency of interruption influences the fulfillment rate, SIs are highly reliable in the first 20 to 30 minutes after deployment, and SIs can be reclaimed by EC2 regardless of an SI's bid price and current workload when EC2 lacks resources for On-Demand and Reserved instances.