An Empirical Analysis of VM Startup Times in Public IaaS Clouds

VM startup time is an essential factor in designing elastic cloud applications. VM autoscaling can reduce the under-/over-provisioning period of VMs with a precise estimation of VM startup time, and in turn, it can guarantee the application's SLOs with improved cost-efficiency. Unfortunately, VM startup time has been little studied, and previous measurement results did not consider various configurations of VMs. This work performs a thorough analysis of VM startup times in two IaaS clouds (AWS, GCP). Specifically, we collected 300,000 data points from each provider by applying diverse VM configurations. i.e., different VM types, image sizes, location, purchase models. With extensive analysis, we found several important factors that can change VM startup time significantly. Moreover, by comparing with a previous study, we confirm that AWS made significant improvements for reducing VM startup times and currently has much quicker VM startup times than in the past.