Analysis of the Influence of Per-Second Billing on Virtual Machine Allocation Costs in Public Clouds
José Luis Gahete Díaz, Joaquín Entrialgo, Javier García, Manuel García, Daniel Fernando Garcia · IEEE Transactions on Services Computing · 2019
For a long time, the common billing time slot used by cloud providers was the hour, but recently they have changed it to one second with a minimum charge of one minute. In this paper, the impact of this change on virtual machine allocation strategies is analyzed. With the minimum one-minute charge, the state-of-the-art allocation strategies are no longer optimal. This paper proposes a new analytic model to obtain the optimal allocation that minimizes the total cost considering this new billing scheme. However, the optimization problem using this model is unmanageable due to its computational complexity. Therefore, other sub-optimal allocations strategies are proposed. The performance of these strategies (in terms of total allocation cost and computational effort) is analyzed in order to assess the influence of the time slot length. Allocation time slots of one hour, one minute and one second are compared. The experimental work is carried out using synthetic workloads based on two real public traces. The study concludes that the time slot of one minute offers the best trade-off between allocation cost and computational effort. The experimentation shows that the proposed strategy can save up to 14 percent over using the time slot of one hour.