Managing Risk in a Derivative IaaS Cloud

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms rent computing resources with different cost and availability tradeoffs. For example, users may acquire virtual machines (VMs) in the spot market that are cheap, but can be unilaterally terminated by the cloud operator. Because of this revocation risk, spot servers have been conventionally used for delay and risk tolerant batch jobs. In this paper, we develop risk mitigation policies which allow even interactive applications to run on spot servers. Our System, SpotCheck is a derivative cloud platform, and provides the illusion of an IaaS platform that offers always-available VMs on demand for a cost near that of spot servers, and supports unmodified applications. SpotCheck’s design combines virtualization-based mechanisms for fault-tolerance, and bidding and server selection policies for managing the risk and cost. We implement SpotCheck on EC2 and show that it i) provides nested VMs with 99.9989% availability, ii) achieves upto 2-5× cost savings compared to using on-demand VMs, and iii) eliminates any risk of losing VM state.