Reducing Costs of Spot Instances Via Checkpointing in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer lower resource costs in exchange for reduced reliability; these instances can be revoked abruptly due to price and demand fluctuations. Mechanisms and tools that deal with the cost-reliability trade-offs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while maintaining high reliability. The authors study how one such a mechanism, namely checkpointing, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning.