Smart Spot Instances for the Supercloud

In this paper, we explore the use of live VM migration to take advantage of spot markets such as provided by Amazon and Google. These markets provide an exciting low cost alternative to regular VM instances, but the threats of price spikes and premature termination severely limit their usability. Migration can address these threats: spot market instances facing price hikes or termination can migrate to other instance types, including regular ones. Reliability can be further improved by replication. In this paper we investigate various design options and present some preliminary results of experiments with dynamic programming techniques, both using simulation and using a realistic deployment. We find that in unstable markets we can achieve significant savings at low overhead and while maintaining good reliability.