SpotCheck

Abstract

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms rent resources, in the form of virtual machines (VMs), under a variety of contract terms that offer different levels of risk and cost. For example, users may acquire VMs in the spot market that are often cheap but entail significant risk, since their price varies over time based on market supply and demand and they may terminate at any time if the price rises too high. Currently, users must manage all the risks associated with using spot servers. As a result, conventional wisdom holds that spot servers are only appropriate for delay-tolerant batch applications. In this paper, we propose a derivative cloud platform, called SpotCheck, that transparently manages the risks associated with using spot servers for users.