Spot Pricing In The Cloud Ecosystem:a Comparative Investigation

Since the cloud computing is an emerging area in recent years.More and more software companies transform their IT infrastructure from self-built sever room to cloud-based architecture.Fixed-price is the common schema for commodity pricing in market economy.It is the same in cloud computing market.But recent years,dynamic pricing appears in cloud computing market,which is also called spot pricing.Spot pricing is considered as a significant supplement for building a full-fledged market economy for the cloud ecosystem.However,it seems that both providers and consumers are still hesitating to enter the cloud spot market.The relevant academic community also has conflicting opinions about cloud spot pricing in terms of revenue generation.The de facto mechanism for pricing spot resources in the Cloud market seems still to be a mystery.Thus,this thesis aims to systematically identify,assess,synthesize and report the published evidence in favor of or against spot-price scheme compared with fixed-price scheme of cloud computing,so as to help relieve the aforementioned conflict.The systematic literature review(SLR)method was employed to collect and investigate the empirical studies of cloud spot pricing indexed by major electronic libraries.To help understand the Cloud spot market,this thesis also investigated the backend theories proposed in the relevant studies.This SLR identified 61 primary studies that either delivered discussions or conducted experiments to perform comparison between spot pricing and fixed pricing in the Cloud domain.The number of publications rises year by year.The reported benefits and limitations were summarized to facilitate cost-benefit analysis of being a cloud spot pricing player,while four types of theories were distinguished to help both researchers and practitioners better understand the Cloud spot market.Furthermore,the thesis has identified six typical fault-tolerance techniques developed from the consumers'perspective,and two improvement approaches proposed from the provider's point of view to address the limitations of Cloud spot pricing.This SLR shows that the academic community strongly advocates the emerging cloud spot market.Although there is still a lack of practical and easily deployable market-driven mechanisms,the overall findings of our work indicate that spot pricing plays a promising role in the sustainability of cloud resource exploitation.