Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing

Cloud providers possessing large quantities of spare capacity must either incentivize clients to purchase it or suffer losses. Amazon is the first cloud provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a periodically changing spot price. Amazon publicizes the spot price but does not disclose how it is determined. By analyzing the spot price histories of Amazon’s EC2 cloud, we reverse engineer how prices are set and construct a model that generates prices consistent with existing price traces. Our findings suggest that usually prices are not market-driven, as sometimes previously assumed. Rather, they are likely to be generated most of the time at random from within a tight price range via a dynamic hidden reserve price mechanism. Our model could help clients make informed bids, cloud providers design profitable systems, and researchers design pricing algorithms.