Title: The study of multi-instance purchase decision-making for minimising customers' cost under fluctuating cloud demands

Authors: Qiping She; Qing Li; Juan Deng

Addresses: City College of Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hubei Wuhan 430000, China ' City College of Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hubei Wuhan 430000, China ' City College of Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hubei Wuhan 430000, China

Abstract: At present, cloud providers can offer cloud consumers three provisioning plans for computing resources, namely on-demand instance, reserved instance and spot instance. On-demand instance is stable, but very expensive; reserved instance is also guaranteed, and advance reservations are required, however customers' future demands are often uncertain; price of spot instance could be the cheapest, but customers have to face the risks of instance interruption. Therefore, how to minimise customers' total cost with taking into account the purchase costs and risks is one of the problems needing urgently to be solved. Taking Amazon EC2 as an example, this article makes a study of multi-instance purchase decision-making for minimising customers' cost under fluctuating cloud demands with taking risk losses into consideration, then describes the conditions and the reasons for optimal decision with a case in detail.

Keywords: cloud computing; demand fluctuation; purchase decision making; multiple instances; Amazon EC2; risk losses; customer costs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2016.074665

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2016 Vol.9 No.1/2, pp.127 - 133

Received: 20 Sep 2014
Accepted: 01 Nov 2014
Published online: 12 Feb 2016 *

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