Abstract

In Cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can be purchased with three pricing schemes, namely reserved pricing, on-demand pricing and spot pricing. Within the spot pricing model, the spot Cloud resources usually refer to the spare compute capacity that can be auctioned in a spot market. A commercial spot market has been established since Amazon launched its spot instance service. Unlike the straightforward fixed-price schemes, the market-driven mechanism behind spot pricing is inevitably sophisticated for both Cloud consumers and providers. In addition, the de facto vendor Amazon does not disclose any backend detail except for its recent spot price history. To help practitioners better understand the spot market and help researchers identify research opportunities, we focused on Amazon's spot service and investigated the relevant studies of the Cloud spot market. The result of our investigation has been organized and summarized into an overview of the current research, as described in this chapter.