Bidding Strategies for Spot Instances in Cloud Computing Markets

Abstract: １ インフラを構築する（ＡＷＳにおけるインフラ；ＶＰＣを構成する；ＶＰＣとオンプレミス環境とを接続する） ２ ファイルオブジェクトを保存・共有・公開する（オブジェクトストレージＳ３の機能；ファイルストレージとして利用する；Ｗｅｂサーバーを構築する；信頼性とコストのバランスをとりたい） ３ アプリケーションサーバーを構築する（Ａｍａｚｏｎ ＥＣ２とＡＷＳ Ｌａｍｂｄａ；スケーラビリティーを高める；サーバーレスでプログラムを動かす；データベースサービスを活用する） ４ ＡＷＳシステムを管理する（リソース監視と異常検知・通報；耐障害性を高める仕組みとバックアップ＆リカバリー；構成管理）

Abstract: Amazon offers spot instances to cloud customers using an auction-like mechanism. These instances are dynamically priced and offered at a lower price with less guarantee of availability. Observing the popularity of Amazon spot instances among the cloud users, research has intensified on defining the users’ and providers’ behavior in the spot market. This work presents an exhaustive survey of spot pricing in cloud ecosystem. An insight into the Amazon spot instances and its pricing mechanism has been presented for better understanding of the spot ecosystem. Spot pricing and resource provisioning problem, modeled as a market mechanism, is discussed from both computational and economics perspective. A significant amount of important research papers related to price prediction and modeling, spot resource provisioning, bidding strategy designing etc. are summarized and categorized to evaluate the state of the art in the context. All theoretical frameworks, developed for cloud spot market, are illustrated and compared in terms of the techniques and their findings. Finally, research gaps are identified and various economic and computational challenges in cloud spot ecosystem are discussed as a guide to the future research.

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. (Less)

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.

Abstract: We present a new part-of-speech tagger that demonstrates the following ideas: (i) explicit use of both preceding and following tag contexts via a dependency network representation, (ii) broad use of lexical features, including jointly conditioning on multiple consecutive words, (iii) effective use of priors in conditional loglinear models, and (iv) fine-grained modeling of unknown word features. Using these ideas together, the resulting tagger gives a 97.24% accuracy on the Penn Treebank WSJ, an error reduction of 4.4% on the best previous single automatically learned tagging result.

Abstract: Recommender systems are changing from novelties used by a few E-commerce sites, to serious business tools that are re-shaping the world of E-commerce. Many of the largest commerce Web sites are already using recommender systems to help their customers find products to purchase. A recommender system learns from a customer and recommends products that she will find most valuable from among the available products. In this paper we present an explanation of how recommender systems help E-commerce sites increase sales, and analyze six sites that use recommender systems including several sites that use more than one recommender system. Based on the examples, we create a taxonomy of recommender systems, including the interfaces they present to customers, the technologies used to create the recommendations, and the inputs they need from customers. We conclude with ideas for new applications of recommender systems to E-commerce.

Abstract: Can Google queries help predict economic activity?The answer depends on what you mean by "predict." Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like "Automotive/Vehicle Shopping" during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.That famous economist Yogi Berra once said "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." This inspired our approach: let us lower the bar and just try to predict the present. Our work to date is summarized in a paper called Predicting the Present with Google Trends. We find that Google Trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behavior. Even predicting the present is useful, since it may help identify "turning points" in economic time series. If people start doing significantly more searches for "Real Estate Agents" in a certain location, it is tempting to think that house sales might increase in that area in the near future.Our paper outlines one approach to short-term economic prediction, but we expect that there are several other interesting ideas out there. So we suggest that forecasting wannabes download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. We'll report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let's see how well that theory works.

Abstract: In this paper we show how to use search engine data to forecast near-term values of economic indicators. Examples include automobile sales, unemployment claims, travel destination planning and consumer confidence.