Cost Optimization Over Amazon EC2 Spot Instances-Research Challenges

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances (SIs) create a competitive low price computing facility. Spot prices are typically far below on-demand prices, and this makes them most suitable to lower the cost of tasks and potentially execute them when there are many spot instances available. However, using spot instances for potential cost savings is a challenging task. The volatility of spot instances deteriorates the QoS of users which in turn limits their usage and escalates the complexity of cloud environment. The surge in utility computing has introduced many trade-offs between price, performance and recently reliability. This paper presents vision and challenges in using spot instances.