Temporal Rate Limiting: Cloud elasticity at a flat fee

In the current usage-based pricing scheme offered by most cloud computing providers, customers are charged based on the capacity and the lease time of the resources they capture (bandwidth, number of virtual machines, IOPS rate, etc.). Taking advantage of this pricing scheme, customers can implement auto-scaling purchase policies by leasing (e.g., hourly) necessary amounts of resources to satisfy a desired QoS threshold under their current demand. Auto-scaling yields strict QoS and variable charges. Some customers, however, would be willing to settle for a more relaxed statistical QoS in exchange for a predictable flat charge. In this work we propose Temporal Rate Limiting (TRL), a purchase policy that permits a customer to allocate optimally a specified purchase budget over a predefined period of time. TRL offers the same expected QoS with auto-scaling but at a lower, flat charge. It also outperforms in terms of QoS a naive flat charge policy that splits the available budget uniformly in time. We quantify the benefits of TRL analytically and also deploy TRL on Amazon EC2 and perform a live validation in the context of a “blacklisting” application for Twitter.