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Amazon introduced spot instances in December 2009, enabling “customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price.” Amazon’s real-time computational spot market was novel in multiple respects. For example, it was the first (and to date only) large-scale public implementation of market-based resource allocation based on dynamic pricing after decades of research, and it provided users with useful information, control knobs, and options for optimizing the cost of running cloud applications. Spot instances also introduced the concept of transient cloud servers derived from variable idle capacity that cloud platforms could revoke at any time. Transient servers have since become central to efficient resource management of modern clusters and clouds. As a result, Amazon’s spot market was the motivation for substantial research over the past decade. Yet, in November 2017, Amazon effectively ended its real-time spot market by announcing that users no longer needed to place bids and that spot prices will “...adjust more gradually, based on longer-term trends in supply and demand.” The changes made spot instances more similar to the fixed-price transient servers offered by other cloud platforms. Unfortunately, while these changes made spot instances less complex, they eliminated many benefits to sophisticated users in optimizing their applications. This paper provides a retrospective on Amazon’s real-time spot market, including its advantages and disadvantages for allocating transient servers compared to current fixed-price approaches. We also discuss some fundamental problems with Amazon’s spot market, which we identified in prior work (from 2016), that predicted its eventual end. We then discuss potential options for allocating transient servers that combine the advantages of Amazon’s real-time spot market, while also addressing the problems that likely led to its elimination.
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Server Architecture From Enterprise to Post-Moore
Luiz Barroso started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation, investigating workload-optimized multiprocessor server architectures marketed to enterprises in the 1990s. These high-margin, low-volume products lost their market to more cost-effective enterprise servers built from high-volume desktop CPUs riding Moore’s law. The enterprise market has slowly transitioned to the cloud, where desktop PCs have formed the backbone of computing in data centers since the early 2000s to minimize cost and maximize the return on investment. Moving forward, with the absence of Moore’s law, future servers require a clean-slate, cross-stack design to scale in compute, communication, and storage capacity while reducing operational, capital, and environmental costs.
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- PAR ID:
- 10558985
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE Micro
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Micro
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0272-1732
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 65 to 73
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/MM.2024.3418975
