Modeling The Temporally Constrained Preemptions of Transient Cloud VMs

Abstract: Transient cloud servers such as Amazon Spot instances, Google Preemptible VMs, and Azure Low-priority batch VMs, can reduce cloud computing costs by as much as $10\times$, but can be unilaterally preempted by the cloud provider. Understanding preemption characteristics (such as frequency) is a key first step in minimizing the effect of preemptions on application performance, availability, and cost. However, little is understood about temporally constrained preemptions---wherein preemptions must occur in a given time window. We study temporally constrained preemptions by conducting a large scale empirical study of Google's Preemptible VMs (that have a maximum lifetime of 24 hours), develop a new preemption probability model, new model-driven resource management policies, and implement them in a batch computing service for scientific computing workloads. Our statistical and experimental analysis indicates that temporally constrained preemptions are not uniformly distributed, but are time-dependent and have a bathtub shape. We find that existing memoryless models and policies are not suitable for temporally constrained preemptions. We develop a new probability model for bathtub preemptions, and analyze it through the lens of reliability theory. To highlight the effectiveness of our model, we develop optimized policies for job scheduling and checkpointing. Compared to existing techniques, our model-based policies can reduce the probability of job failure by more than $2\times$. We also implement our policies as part of a batch computing service for scientific computing applications, which reduces cost by $5\times$ compared to conventional cloud deployments and keeps performance overheads under $3\%$.