HotSpot

Interested in transient servers (like Amazon spot instances) but burdened by the effort to explicitly manage their risk-cost-performance tradeoff? Don't want to rely on third-party intermediaries (like SpotInst) to run your workload? Try HotSpot!

Motivation

HotSpot is motivated by our spot market analysis and observations that (i) the most discounted VMs tend to have low revocation risks (as a high discount reflects low demand relative to supply), and (ii) price risk (i.e., risk that a VM's price will increase relative to others) is more dynamic than revocation risk. Together, these observations show an opportunity to lower an application's cost via server hopping without increasing its revocation risk or decreasing its performance (in fact, our analysis shows that in current EC2 spot markets, hopping decreases revocation risk as well as increases performance). This is akin to active trading in financial markets.

Automated Server Hopping

At the core of HotSpot is a new system level mechanism called automated server hopping, which enables applications to proactively but transparently migrate to spot VMs that currently offer the lowest cost. HotSpot is designed to be transparent (requires no modifications to applications or existing cloud provider SLOs), simple (users just need to use a HotSpot enabled AMI), and decentralized (does not need economy of scale to work). Learn more about the system design and evaluation in the paper below.

Publications

HotSpot: Automated Server Hopping in Cloud Spot Markets
Supreeth Shastri and David Irwin
SoCC 2017   PAPER  

Towards Self-optimizing Cloud Servers
Supreeth Shastri and David Irwin
SoCC 2016   POSTER  

Contact Us

We would love to hear from you. Please send a note to Supreeth or David for any questions on or feedback about HotSpot.

Based on a template from Matei Zaharia.