Location, location, location : exploring Amazon EC2 spot instance pricing across geographical regions

Abstract

Cloud computing is a ubiquitous part of the computing landscape. For many companies today, moving their computing infrastructure to the cloud reduces time to deployment and saves money. Spot Instances, a subset of Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure (EC2), expands upon this. They allow a user to bid on spare compute capacity in EC2 at heavily discounted prices. If other bids for the spare capacity exceeds the user's own, the user's instance is terminated. In this paper, we conduct one of the first detailed analyses of how location affects the overall cost of deployment of a Spot Instance. We analyse pricing data across all available AWS regions for 60 days for a variety of Spot Instances. We relate the pricing data we find to the overall AWS region and examine any patterns we see across the week. We find that location plays a critical role in Spot Instance pricing and that pricing differs, sometimes markedly, from region to region. We conclude by showing that it is indeed possible to run workloads on Spot Instances with low risk of termination and a low overall cost.