A Novel Checkpointing Scheme for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Amazon´s spot instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current spot price. Customers may expect their services at lower cost with spot instances compared to on-demand or reserved. However, the reliability is compromised since the instances providing the service may become unavailable at any time. In this paper, we study various check pointing schemes that can be used with spot instances. Also we devise some algorithms for check pointing scheme on top of application-centric resource provisioning framework that increase the reliability while reducing the cost significantly.