Using a Predator-Prey Model to Explain Variations of Cloud Spot Price

Zheng Li, William Tärneberg, Maria Kihl, Anders Robertsson

2016

Abstract

The spot pricing scheme has been considered to be resource-efficient for providers and cost-effective for consumers in the Cloud market. Nevertheless, unlike the static and straightforward strategies of trading on-demand and reserved Cloud services, the market-driven mechanism for trading spot service would be complicated for both implementation and understanding. The largely invisible market activities and their complex interactions could especially make Cloud consumers hesitate to enter the spot market. To reduce the complexity in understanding the Cloud spot market, we decided to reveal the backend information behind spot price variations. Inspired by the methodology of reverse engineering, we developed a Predator-Prey model that can simulate the interactions between demand and resource based on the visible spot price traces. The simulation results have shown some basic regular patterns of market activities with respect to Amazon’s spot instance type m3.large. Although the findings of this study need further validation by using practical data, our work essentially suggests a promising approach (i.e. using a Predator-Prey model) to investigate spot market activities.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Li Z., Tärneberg W., Kihl M. and Robertsson A. (2016). Using a Predator-Prey Model to Explain Variations of Cloud Spot Price . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 2: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-182-3, pages 51-58. DOI: 10.5220/0005808600510058

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer16,
author={Zheng Li and William Tärneberg and Maria Kihl and Anders Robertsson},
title={Using a Predator-Prey Model to Explain Variations of Cloud Spot Price},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 2: CLOSER,},
year={2016},
pages={51-58},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005808600510058},
isbn={978-989-758-182-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 2: CLOSER,
TI - Using a Predator-Prey Model to Explain Variations of Cloud Spot Price
SN - 978-989-758-182-3
AU - Li Z.
AU - Tärneberg W.
AU - Kihl M.
AU - Robertsson A.
PY - 2016
SP - 51
EP - 58
DO - 10.5220/0005808600510058