Cloud Pricing: The Spot Market Strikes Back

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dierks, Ludwig; Seuken, Sven
• 署名单位: University of Zurich
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3907
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 105-122
• 关键词: Cloud Computing; queuing theory; game theory; profit optimization; market design

摘要

Cloud computing providers must constantly hold many idle compute instances available (e.g., for maintenance or for users with long-term contracts). A natural idea, which should intuitively increase the provider's profit, is to sell these idle instances on a secondary market, for example, via a preemptible spot market. However, this ignores possible market cannibalization effects that may occur in equilibrium as well as the additional costs the provider experiences due to preemptions. To study the viability of offering a spot market, we model the provider's profit optimization problem by combining queuing theory and game theory to analyze the equilibria of the resulting queuing system. Our main result is an easy-to-check condition under which a provider can simultaneously achieve a profit increase and create a Pareto improvement for the users by offering a spot market (using idle resources) alongside a fixed-price market. Finally, we illustrate our results numerically to demonstrate the effects that the provider's costs and her strategy have on her profit.