Optimal Bids for Spot VMs in a Cloud for Deadline Constrained Jobs

Spot virtual-machine (VM) instances, such as Amazon EC2 Spot VMs, are a class of VMs that are purchased through a market mechanism of price-bids submitted by cloud users. Spot VMs can be obtained at substantially lower cost than other VM classes such as Reserved and On-demand instances, but they do not have guaranteed availability since it depends on the submitted price bids and the fluctuating spot VM price. Many applications with large computing requirements but no real-time availability constraints, such as scientific computing, financial modelling and large data analysis, can be carried out at a significantly lower cost using spot VMs. For such jobs, an important question that arises is what should the submitted price bids be so that the computation is completed within a fixed time interval while the cost is minimized. Towards this goal, we model a job as a fixed computation request with a deadline constraint and formulate the problem of designing a dynamic bidding policy that minimizes the average cost of job completion. We obtain analytical and closed-form results for the optimal strategy under a Markov spot price evolution, and then evaluate the performance of the algorithms on the actual spot price history of Amazon EC2 Spot VMs.