Spot pricing in the Cloud ecosystem: A comparative investigation

Zheng Li; He Zhang; Liam O'Brien; Shu Jiang; You Zhou; Maria Kihl; Rajiv Ranjan

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.042

Spot pricing in the Cloud ecosystem: A comparative investigation

Zheng Li, He Zhang^*, Liam O'Brien, Shu Jiang, You Zhou, Maria Kihl, Rajiv Ranjan

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Background: Spot pricing is considered as a significant supplement for building a full-fledged market economy for the Cloud ecosystem. However, it seems that both providers and consumers are still hesitating to enter the Cloud spot market. The relevant academic community also has conflicting opinions about Cloud spot pricing in terms of revenue generation.

Aim: This work aims to systematically identify, assess, synthesize and report the published evidence in favor of or against spot-price scheme compared with fixed-price scheme of Cloud computing, so as to help relieve the aforementioned conflict.

Method: We employed the systematic literature review (SLR) method to collect and investigate the empirical studies of Cloud spot pricing indexed by major electronic libraries.

Results: This SLR identified 61 primary studies that either delivered discussions or conducted experiments to perform comparison between spot pricing and fixed pricing in the Cloud domain. The reported benefits and limitations were summarized to facilitate cost-benefit analysis of being a Cloud spot pricing player, while four types of theories were distinguished to help both researchers and practitioners better understand the Cloud spot market.

Conclusions: This SLR shows that the academic community strongly advocates the emerging Cloud spot market. Although there is still a lack of practical and easily deployable market-driven mechanisms, the overall findings of our work indicate that spot pricing plays a promising role in the sustainability of Cloud resource exploitation.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-19
Number of pages	19
Journal	Journal of Systems and Software
Volume	114
Early online date	13 Jan 2016
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.042
Publication status	Published - 01 Apr 2016
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
[CC14] Se-Hak Chun and Byong-Sam Choi. Service models and pricing schemes for cloud computing. Cluster Computing , 17(2):529–535, June 2014. [dSdMSNG + 12] Francisco Airton Pereira da Silva, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia, Rodrigo Elia Assad, and Fernando Antonio Mota Trinta. Accounting models for Cloud computing: a systematic mapping study. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications (GCA 2012) , pages 3–9, Las Vegas, USA, 16–19 July 2012. [KKP15] Sowmya Karunakaran, Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy, and Sundarraj Rangaraja P. Business view of Cloud: decisions, models and opportunities a classification and review of research. Management Research Review , 38(6):582–604, June 2015. [KM13] Sunirmal Khatua and Nandini Mukherjee. A novel checkpointing scheme for Amazon EC2 spot instances. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2013) , pages 180–181, Delft, the Netherlands, 13–16 May 2013. IEEE Computer Society. [MAT10] Thomas Meinl, Arun Anandasivam, and Michiaki Tatsubori. Enabling Cloud service reservation with derivatives and yield management. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC 2010) , pages 150–155, Shanghai, China, 10–12 November 2010. IEEE Computer Society. [PR14] Abhinandan S. Prasad and Shrisha Rao. A mechanism design approach to resource procurement in Cloud computing. IEEE Transactions on Computers , 63(1):17–30, January 2014. [PRC13] Marco Polverini, Shaolei Ren, and Antonio Cianfrani. Capacity provisioning and pricing for Cloud computing with energy capping. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton 2013) , pages 413–420, Monticello, IL, USA, 2–4 October 2013. IEEE. [PS12] Komal Singh Patel and A. K. Sarje. VM provisioning method to improve the profit and SLA violation of Cloud service providers. In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets (CCEM 2012) , pages 1–5, Bangalore, India, 11–12 October 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [STT + 12] Bhanu Sharma, Ruppa K. Thulasiram, Parimala Thulasiraman, Saurabh K. Garg, and Rajkumar Buyya. Pricing Cloud compute commodities: A novel financial economic model. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012) , pages 451–457, Ottawa, ON, Canada, 13–16 May 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [TWQY12] Cheng Tian, Ying Wang, Feng Qi, and Bo Yin. Decision model for provisioning virtual resources in Amazon EC2. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2012) , pages 159–163, Las Vegas, USA, 22–26 October 2012. International Federation for Information Processing. [VDB11] Kurt Vanmechelen, Wim Depoorter, and Jan Broeckhove. Combining futures and spot markets: a hybrid market approach to economic Grid resource management. Journal of Grid Computing , 9(1):81–94, March 2011. [ZG10] Sharrukh Zaman and Daniel Grosu. Combinatorial auction-based allocation of virtual machine instances in Clouds. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2010) , pages 127–134, Indianapolis, USA, 30 November - 3 December 2010. IEEE Computer Society. [ZG12] Sharrukh Zaman and Daniel Grosu. An online mechanism for dynamic VM provisioning and allocation in Clouds. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2012) , pages 253–260, Honolulu, HI, USA, 24–29 June 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [ZLW + 14] Jian Zhao, Hongxing Li, Chuan Wu, Zongpeng Li, Zhizhong Zhang, and Francis C.M. Lau. Dynamic pricing and profit maximization for the Cloud with geo-distributed data centers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2014) , pages 118–126, Toronto, Canada, 27 April–2 May 2014. IEEE Press. [ZSS + 15] Ao Zhou, Qibo Sun, Lei Sun, Jinglin Li, and Fangchun Yang. Maximizing the profits of Cloud service providers via dynamic virtual resource renting approach. EURASIP Journal onWireless Communications and Networking , pages 1–12, March 2015. Zheng Li is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology at Lund University, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. degree and M.E. by Research from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) respectively. During the same time, he was a graduate researcher with the Software Systems Research Group (SSRG) at National ICT Australia (NICTA). Before moving abroad, he had around four-year industrial experience in China after receiving his M.Sc. from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and the B.Eng. from the Zhengzhou University. His research interests include Cloud computing, performance engineering, empirical software engineering, software cost/effort estimation, and Web service composition. He Zhang is a professor of software engineering in the Software Institute at Nanjing University, China. He joined academia after seven years within industry, developing software systems in the areas of aerospace and complex data management. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D in computer science from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and has published 100+ peer-reviewed research papers in the high quality international journals, conferences, and workshops. He undertakes research in software engineering, in particular software process (modeling, simulation, analytics and improvement), software quality, empirical and evidence-based software engineering, and service-oriented computing. Dr. Zhang is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM (SIGSOFT), and serves on the Steering Committees, Program Committees, and Organizing Committees of a number of premier international conferences in software engineering community. Liam O’Brien received a Ph.D degree from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 1996. He has over 25 years experience in research and development in software engineering. He is an Enterprise Solutions Architect with Geoscience Australia, Canberra, Australia, and was previously the Chief Software Architect with CSIRO and a Principal Researcher at the National ICT Australia's e-Government Initiative. He has published 60+ peer-reviewed research papers in international journals, conferences, and workshops. He has previously worked at Lero (Ireland), Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (USA), and CSIRO (Australia). His main areas of research include enterprise, systems and software architecture, SOA, cloud computing, service science, software reuse, and software modernisation, Dr. O’Brien is a member of the IEEE, Australian Computer Society and Australian Service Science Society. Shu Jiang is a Master by Research Student at the Software Institute of Nanjing University. He received his Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering from the Nanjing University, Nanjing, China in 2014. He worked on several research projects such as web application, business intelligence tool. He is the author or co-author of five journal and conference publications. His research interests include cloud computing, software process, software architecture, container-as-a-service and data science. You Zhou is a Master by Research Student at the Software Institute of Nanjing University. He received his Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering from the Jiangsu University, China in 2013. He served as the Local Arrangment Coordinator of both ICSSP 2014 and EASE 2015 conferences. He is the author or co-author of several international journal and conference publications. His research interests include empirical software engineering, Cloud computing and green computing. Maria Kihl is a Professor in Internetworked Systems at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden. She received her Ph.D in Engineering at the Department of Communication Systems, Lund University. Her work focuses on performance modeling, analysis, and control of distributed Internet-based systems, currently Cloud systems and media distribution architectures. Rajiv Ranjan is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Computing Science at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. At Newcastle University he is working on projects related to emerging areas in parallel and distributed systems (Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, and Big Data). Previously, he was Julius Fellow (2013–2015), Senior Research Scientist (equivalent to Senior Lecturer in Australian/UK University Grading System) and Project Leader in the Digital Productivity and Services Flagship of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO – Australian Government’s Premier Research Agency). Prior to that he was a Senior Research Associate (Lecturer level B) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). Dr. Ranjan has a Ph.D (2009) in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Melbourne.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Cloud computing
Cloud spot pricing
Systematic literature review

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Information Systems
Hardware and Architecture

Access to Document

10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.042Licence: Unspecified

Cite this

@article{067fd59a9e5c4866bea31fd3db2168a1,

title = "Spot pricing in the Cloud ecosystem: A comparative investigation",

abstract = "Background: Spot pricing is considered as a significant supplement for building a full-fledged market economy for the Cloud ecosystem. However, it seems that both providers and consumers are still hesitating to enter the Cloud spot market. The relevant academic community also has conflicting opinions about Cloud spot pricing in terms of revenue generation.Aim: This work aims to systematically identify, assess, synthesize and report the published evidence in favor of or against spot-price scheme compared with fixed-price scheme of Cloud computing, so as to help relieve the aforementioned conflict.Method: We employed the systematic literature review (SLR) method to collect and investigate the empirical studies of Cloud spot pricing indexed by major electronic libraries.Results: This SLR identified 61 primary studies that either delivered discussions or conducted experiments to perform comparison between spot pricing and fixed pricing in the Cloud domain. The reported benefits and limitations were summarized to facilitate cost-benefit analysis of being a Cloud spot pricing player, while four types of theories were distinguished to help both researchers and practitioners better understand the Cloud spot market.Conclusions: This SLR shows that the academic community strongly advocates the emerging Cloud spot market. Although there is still a lack of practical and easily deployable market-driven mechanisms, the overall findings of our work indicate that spot pricing plays a promising role in the sustainability of Cloud resource exploitation.",

keywords = "Cloud computing, Cloud spot pricing, Systematic literature review",

author = "Zheng Li and He Zhang and Liam O'Brien and Shu Jiang and You Zhou and Maria Kihl and Rajiv Ranjan",

note = "Funding Information: [CC14] Se-Hak Chun and Byong-Sam Choi. Service models and pricing schemes for cloud computing. Cluster Computing , 17(2):529–535, June 2014. [dSdMSNG + 12] Francisco Airton Pereira da Silva, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia, Rodrigo Elia Assad, and Fernando Antonio Mota Trinta. Accounting models for Cloud computing: a systematic mapping study. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications (GCA 2012) , pages 3–9, Las Vegas, USA, 16–19 July 2012. [KKP15] Sowmya Karunakaran, Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy, and Sundarraj Rangaraja P. Business view of Cloud: decisions, models and opportunities a classification and review of research. Management Research Review , 38(6):582–604, June 2015. [KM13] Sunirmal Khatua and Nandini Mukherjee. A novel checkpointing scheme for Amazon EC2 spot instances. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2013) , pages 180–181, Delft, the Netherlands, 13–16 May 2013. IEEE Computer Society. [MAT10] Thomas Meinl, Arun Anandasivam, and Michiaki Tatsubori. Enabling Cloud service reservation with derivatives and yield management. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC 2010) , pages 150–155, Shanghai, China, 10–12 November 2010. IEEE Computer Society. [PR14] Abhinandan S. Prasad and Shrisha Rao. A mechanism design approach to resource procurement in Cloud computing. IEEE Transactions on Computers , 63(1):17–30, January 2014. [PRC13] Marco Polverini, Shaolei Ren, and Antonio Cianfrani. Capacity provisioning and pricing for Cloud computing with energy capping. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton 2013) , pages 413–420, Monticello, IL, USA, 2–4 October 2013. IEEE. [PS12] Komal Singh Patel and A. K. Sarje. VM provisioning method to improve the profit and SLA violation of Cloud service providers. In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets (CCEM 2012) , pages 1–5, Bangalore, India, 11–12 October 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [STT + 12] Bhanu Sharma, Ruppa K. Thulasiram, Parimala Thulasiraman, Saurabh K. Garg, and Rajkumar Buyya. Pricing Cloud compute commodities: A novel financial economic model. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012) , pages 451–457, Ottawa, ON, Canada, 13–16 May 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [TWQY12] Cheng Tian, Ying Wang, Feng Qi, and Bo Yin. Decision model for provisioning virtual resources in Amazon EC2. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2012) , pages 159–163, Las Vegas, USA, 22–26 October 2012. International Federation for Information Processing. [VDB11] Kurt Vanmechelen, Wim Depoorter, and Jan Broeckhove. Combining futures and spot markets: a hybrid market approach to economic Grid resource management. Journal of Grid Computing , 9(1):81–94, March 2011. [ZG10] Sharrukh Zaman and Daniel Grosu. Combinatorial auction-based allocation of virtual machine instances in Clouds. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2010) , pages 127–134, Indianapolis, USA, 30 November - 3 December 2010. IEEE Computer Society. [ZG12] Sharrukh Zaman and Daniel Grosu. An online mechanism for dynamic VM provisioning and allocation in Clouds. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2012) , pages 253–260, Honolulu, HI, USA, 24–29 June 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [ZLW + 14] Jian Zhao, Hongxing Li, Chuan Wu, Zongpeng Li, Zhizhong Zhang, and Francis C.M. Lau. Dynamic pricing and profit maximization for the Cloud with geo-distributed data centers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2014) , pages 118–126, Toronto, Canada, 27 April–2 May 2014. IEEE Press. [ZSS + 15] Ao Zhou, Qibo Sun, Lei Sun, Jinglin Li, and Fangchun Yang. Maximizing the profits of Cloud service providers via dynamic virtual resource renting approach. EURASIP Journal onWireless Communications and Networking , pages 1–12, March 2015. Zheng Li is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology at Lund University, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. degree and M.E. by Research from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) respectively. During the same time, he was a graduate researcher with the Software Systems Research Group (SSRG) at National ICT Australia (NICTA). Before moving abroad, he had around four-year industrial experience in China after receiving his M.Sc. from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and the B.Eng. from the Zhengzhou University. His research interests include Cloud computing, performance engineering, empirical software engineering, software cost/effort estimation, and Web service composition. He Zhang is a professor of software engineering in the Software Institute at Nanjing University, China. He joined academia after seven years within industry, developing software systems in the areas of aerospace and complex data management. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D in computer science from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and has published 100+ peer-reviewed research papers in the high quality international journals, conferences, and workshops. He undertakes research in software engineering, in particular software process (modeling, simulation, analytics and improvement), software quality, empirical and evidence-based software engineering, and service-oriented computing. Dr. Zhang is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM (SIGSOFT), and serves on the Steering Committees, Program Committees, and Organizing Committees of a number of premier international conferences in software engineering community. Liam O{\textquoteright}Brien received a Ph.D degree from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 1996. He has over 25 years experience in research and development in software engineering. He is an Enterprise Solutions Architect with Geoscience Australia, Canberra, Australia, and was previously the Chief Software Architect with CSIRO and a Principal Researcher at the National ICT Australia's e-Government Initiative. He has published 60+ peer-reviewed research papers in international journals, conferences, and workshops. He has previously worked at Lero (Ireland), Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (USA), and CSIRO (Australia). His main areas of research include enterprise, systems and software architecture, SOA, cloud computing, service science, software reuse, and software modernisation, Dr. O{\textquoteright}Brien is a member of the IEEE, Australian Computer Society and Australian Service Science Society. Shu Jiang is a Master by Research Student at the Software Institute of Nanjing University. He received his Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering from the Nanjing University, Nanjing, China in 2014. He worked on several research projects such as web application, business intelligence tool. He is the author or co-author of five journal and conference publications. His research interests include cloud computing, software process, software architecture, container-as-a-service and data science. You Zhou is a Master by Research Student at the Software Institute of Nanjing University. He received his Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering from the Jiangsu University, China in 2013. He served as the Local Arrangment Coordinator of both ICSSP 2014 and EASE 2015 conferences. He is the author or co-author of several international journal and conference publications. His research interests include empirical software engineering, Cloud computing and green computing. Maria Kihl is a Professor in Internetworked Systems at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden. She received her Ph.D in Engineering at the Department of Communication Systems, Lund University. Her work focuses on performance modeling, analysis, and control of distributed Internet-based systems, currently Cloud systems and media distribution architectures. Rajiv Ranjan is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Computing Science at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. At Newcastle University he is working on projects related to emerging areas in parallel and distributed systems (Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, and Big Data). Previously, he was Julius Fellow (2013–2015), Senior Research Scientist (equivalent to Senior Lecturer in Australian/UK University Grading System) and Project Leader in the Digital Productivity and Services Flagship of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO – Australian Government{\textquoteright}s Premier Research Agency). Prior to that he was a Senior Research Associate (Lecturer level B) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). Dr. Ranjan has a Ph.D (2009) in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Melbourne. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.",

year = "2016",

month = apr,

day = "1",

doi = "10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.042",

language = "English",

volume = "114",

pages = "1--19",

journal = "Journal of Systems and Software",

issn = "0164-1212",

publisher = "Elsevier Inc.",

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TY - JOUR

T1 - Spot pricing in the Cloud ecosystem: A comparative investigation

AU - Li, Zheng

AU - Zhang, He

AU - O'Brien, Liam

AU - Jiang, Shu

AU - Zhou, You

AU - Kihl, Maria

AU - Ranjan, Rajiv

N1 - Funding Information: [CC14] Se-Hak Chun and Byong-Sam Choi. Service models and pricing schemes for cloud computing. Cluster Computing , 17(2):529–535, June 2014. [dSdMSNG + 12] Francisco Airton Pereira da Silva, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia, Rodrigo Elia Assad, and Fernando Antonio Mota Trinta. Accounting models for Cloud computing: a systematic mapping study. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications (GCA 2012) , pages 3–9, Las Vegas, USA, 16–19 July 2012. [KKP15] Sowmya Karunakaran, Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy, and Sundarraj Rangaraja P. Business view of Cloud: decisions, models and opportunities a classification and review of research. Management Research Review , 38(6):582–604, June 2015. [KM13] Sunirmal Khatua and Nandini Mukherjee. A novel checkpointing scheme for Amazon EC2 spot instances. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2013) , pages 180–181, Delft, the Netherlands, 13–16 May 2013. IEEE Computer Society. [MAT10] Thomas Meinl, Arun Anandasivam, and Michiaki Tatsubori. Enabling Cloud service reservation with derivatives and yield management. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC 2010) , pages 150–155, Shanghai, China, 10–12 November 2010. IEEE Computer Society. [PR14] Abhinandan S. Prasad and Shrisha Rao. A mechanism design approach to resource procurement in Cloud computing. IEEE Transactions on Computers , 63(1):17–30, January 2014. [PRC13] Marco Polverini, Shaolei Ren, and Antonio Cianfrani. Capacity provisioning and pricing for Cloud computing with energy capping. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton 2013) , pages 413–420, Monticello, IL, USA, 2–4 October 2013. IEEE. [PS12] Komal Singh Patel and A. K. Sarje. VM provisioning method to improve the profit and SLA violation of Cloud service providers. In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets (CCEM 2012) , pages 1–5, Bangalore, India, 11–12 October 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [STT + 12] Bhanu Sharma, Ruppa K. Thulasiram, Parimala Thulasiraman, Saurabh K. Garg, and Rajkumar Buyya. Pricing Cloud compute commodities: A novel financial economic model. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012) , pages 451–457, Ottawa, ON, Canada, 13–16 May 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [TWQY12] Cheng Tian, Ying Wang, Feng Qi, and Bo Yin. Decision model for provisioning virtual resources in Amazon EC2. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2012) , pages 159–163, Las Vegas, USA, 22–26 October 2012. International Federation for Information Processing. [VDB11] Kurt Vanmechelen, Wim Depoorter, and Jan Broeckhove. Combining futures and spot markets: a hybrid market approach to economic Grid resource management. Journal of Grid Computing , 9(1):81–94, March 2011. [ZG10] Sharrukh Zaman and Daniel Grosu. Combinatorial auction-based allocation of virtual machine instances in Clouds. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2010) , pages 127–134, Indianapolis, USA, 30 November - 3 December 2010. IEEE Computer Society. [ZG12] Sharrukh Zaman and Daniel Grosu. An online mechanism for dynamic VM provisioning and allocation in Clouds. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2012) , pages 253–260, Honolulu, HI, USA, 24–29 June 2012. IEEE Computer Society. [ZLW + 14] Jian Zhao, Hongxing Li, Chuan Wu, Zongpeng Li, Zhizhong Zhang, and Francis C.M. Lau. Dynamic pricing and profit maximization for the Cloud with geo-distributed data centers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2014) , pages 118–126, Toronto, Canada, 27 April–2 May 2014. IEEE Press. [ZSS + 15] Ao Zhou, Qibo Sun, Lei Sun, Jinglin Li, and Fangchun Yang. Maximizing the profits of Cloud service providers via dynamic virtual resource renting approach. EURASIP Journal onWireless Communications and Networking , pages 1–12, March 2015. Zheng Li is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology at Lund University, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. degree and M.E. by Research from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) respectively. During the same time, he was a graduate researcher with the Software Systems Research Group (SSRG) at National ICT Australia (NICTA). Before moving abroad, he had around four-year industrial experience in China after receiving his M.Sc. from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and the B.Eng. from the Zhengzhou University. His research interests include Cloud computing, performance engineering, empirical software engineering, software cost/effort estimation, and Web service composition. He Zhang is a professor of software engineering in the Software Institute at Nanjing University, China. He joined academia after seven years within industry, developing software systems in the areas of aerospace and complex data management. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D in computer science from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and has published 100+ peer-reviewed research papers in the high quality international journals, conferences, and workshops. He undertakes research in software engineering, in particular software process (modeling, simulation, analytics and improvement), software quality, empirical and evidence-based software engineering, and service-oriented computing. Dr. Zhang is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM (SIGSOFT), and serves on the Steering Committees, Program Committees, and Organizing Committees of a number of premier international conferences in software engineering community. Liam O’Brien received a Ph.D degree from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 1996. He has over 25 years experience in research and development in software engineering. He is an Enterprise Solutions Architect with Geoscience Australia, Canberra, Australia, and was previously the Chief Software Architect with CSIRO and a Principal Researcher at the National ICT Australia's e-Government Initiative. He has published 60+ peer-reviewed research papers in international journals, conferences, and workshops. He has previously worked at Lero (Ireland), Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (USA), and CSIRO (Australia). His main areas of research include enterprise, systems and software architecture, SOA, cloud computing, service science, software reuse, and software modernisation, Dr. O’Brien is a member of the IEEE, Australian Computer Society and Australian Service Science Society. Shu Jiang is a Master by Research Student at the Software Institute of Nanjing University. He received his Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering from the Nanjing University, Nanjing, China in 2014. He worked on several research projects such as web application, business intelligence tool. He is the author or co-author of five journal and conference publications. His research interests include cloud computing, software process, software architecture, container-as-a-service and data science. You Zhou is a Master by Research Student at the Software Institute of Nanjing University. He received his Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering from the Jiangsu University, China in 2013. He served as the Local Arrangment Coordinator of both ICSSP 2014 and EASE 2015 conferences. He is the author or co-author of several international journal and conference publications. His research interests include empirical software engineering, Cloud computing and green computing. Maria Kihl is a Professor in Internetworked Systems at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden. She received her Ph.D in Engineering at the Department of Communication Systems, Lund University. Her work focuses on performance modeling, analysis, and control of distributed Internet-based systems, currently Cloud systems and media distribution architectures. Rajiv Ranjan is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Computing Science at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. At Newcastle University he is working on projects related to emerging areas in parallel and distributed systems (Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, and Big Data). Previously, he was Julius Fellow (2013–2015), Senior Research Scientist (equivalent to Senior Lecturer in Australian/UK University Grading System) and Project Leader in the Digital Productivity and Services Flagship of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO – Australian Government’s Premier Research Agency). Prior to that he was a Senior Research Associate (Lecturer level B) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). Dr. Ranjan has a Ph.D (2009) in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Melbourne. Publisher Copyright: © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PY - 2016/4/1

Y1 - 2016/4/1

N2 - Background: Spot pricing is considered as a significant supplement for building a full-fledged market economy for the Cloud ecosystem. However, it seems that both providers and consumers are still hesitating to enter the Cloud spot market. The relevant academic community also has conflicting opinions about Cloud spot pricing in terms of revenue generation.Aim: This work aims to systematically identify, assess, synthesize and report the published evidence in favor of or against spot-price scheme compared with fixed-price scheme of Cloud computing, so as to help relieve the aforementioned conflict.Method: We employed the systematic literature review (SLR) method to collect and investigate the empirical studies of Cloud spot pricing indexed by major electronic libraries.Results: This SLR identified 61 primary studies that either delivered discussions or conducted experiments to perform comparison between spot pricing and fixed pricing in the Cloud domain. The reported benefits and limitations were summarized to facilitate cost-benefit analysis of being a Cloud spot pricing player, while four types of theories were distinguished to help both researchers and practitioners better understand the Cloud spot market.Conclusions: This SLR shows that the academic community strongly advocates the emerging Cloud spot market. Although there is still a lack of practical and easily deployable market-driven mechanisms, the overall findings of our work indicate that spot pricing plays a promising role in the sustainability of Cloud resource exploitation.

AB - Background: Spot pricing is considered as a significant supplement for building a full-fledged market economy for the Cloud ecosystem. However, it seems that both providers and consumers are still hesitating to enter the Cloud spot market. The relevant academic community also has conflicting opinions about Cloud spot pricing in terms of revenue generation.Aim: This work aims to systematically identify, assess, synthesize and report the published evidence in favor of or against spot-price scheme compared with fixed-price scheme of Cloud computing, so as to help relieve the aforementioned conflict.Method: We employed the systematic literature review (SLR) method to collect and investigate the empirical studies of Cloud spot pricing indexed by major electronic libraries.Results: This SLR identified 61 primary studies that either delivered discussions or conducted experiments to perform comparison between spot pricing and fixed pricing in the Cloud domain. The reported benefits and limitations were summarized to facilitate cost-benefit analysis of being a Cloud spot pricing player, while four types of theories were distinguished to help both researchers and practitioners better understand the Cloud spot market.Conclusions: This SLR shows that the academic community strongly advocates the emerging Cloud spot market. Although there is still a lack of practical and easily deployable market-driven mechanisms, the overall findings of our work indicate that spot pricing plays a promising role in the sustainability of Cloud resource exploitation.

KW - Cloud computing

KW - Cloud spot pricing

KW - Systematic literature review

U2 - 10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.042

DO - 10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.042

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84960130505

SN - 0164-1212

VL - 114

SP - 1

EP - 19

JO - Journal of Systems and Software

JF - Journal of Systems and Software

ER -

Spot pricing in the Cloud ecosystem: A comparative investigation

Abstract

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Keywords

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Cite this