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Home » How Not to Bid the Cloud
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How Not to Bid the Cloud

Authors: 

Prateek Sharma, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract: 

Cloud providers have begun to allow users to bid for surplus servers on a spot market. These servers are allocated if a user’s bid price is higher than their market price and revoked otherwise. Thus, analyzing price data to derive optimal bidding strategies has become a popular research topic. In this paper, we argue that sophisticated bidding strategies, in practice, do not provide any advantages over simple strategies for multiple reasons. First, due to price characteristics, there are a wide range of bid prices that yield the optimal cost and availability. Second, given the large number of spot markets, there is always a market with available surplus resources. Thus, if resources become unavailable due to a price spike, users need not wait until the spike subsides, but can instead provision a new spot resource elsewhere and migrate to it. Third, current spot market rules enable users to place maximum bids for resources without any penalty. Given bidding’s irrelevance, users can adopt trivial bidding strategies and focus instead on modifying applications to efficiently seek out and migrate to the lowest cost resources.

Prateek Sharma, University of Massachusetts Amherst

David Irwin, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {196312,
author = {Prateek Sharma and David Irwin and Prashant Shenoy},
title = {How Not to Bid the Cloud},
booktitle = {8th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud 16)},
year = {2016},
address = {Denver, CO},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud16/workshop-program/presentation/sharma},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun,
}
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