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Amazon is the first cloud provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a periodically changing spot price. Amazon publicizes the spot price but does not disclose how it is determined.<\/jats:p><jats:p>By analyzing the spot price histories of Amazon\u2019s EC2 cloud, we reverse engineer how prices are set and construct a model that generates prices consistent with existing price traces. Our findings suggest that usually prices are not market-driven, as sometimes previously assumed. Rather, they are likely to be generated most of the time at random from within a tight price range via a dynamic hidden reserve price mechanism. Our model could help clients make informed bids, cloud providers design profitable systems, and researchers design pricing algorithms.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/2509413.2509416","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2013,9,23]],"date-time":"2013-09-23T13:47:05Z","timestamp":1379944025000},"page":"1-20","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":166,"title":["Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"1","author":[{"given":"Orna","family":"Agmon Ben-Yehuda","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Muli","family":"Ben-Yehuda","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Assaf","family":"Schuster","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dan","family":"Tsafrir","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2013,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/CloudCom.2011.48"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-540-85485-2_15"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","unstructured":"Amazon. 2009. 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