Cloud Pricing: The Spot Market Strikes Back
研究云服务商在固定价格市场外增设可抢占的现货市场是否真的能提高利润，通过排队论和博弈论分析均衡，给出了一个易于检验的条件，表明在满足该条件时现货市场能同时增加利润并改善用户福利。
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. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.