Cost-Aware Elastic Cloud Provisioning for Scientific Workloads

Cloud computing provides an efficient model to host and scale scientific applications. While cloud-based approaches can reduce costs as users pay only for the resources used, it is often challenging to scale execution both efficiently and cost-effectively. We describe here a cost-aware elastic cloud provisioner designed to elastically provision cloud infrastructure to execute analyses cost-effectively. The provisioner considers real-time spot instance prices across availability zones, leverages application profiles to optimize instance type selection, over-provisions resources to alleviate bottlenecks caused by oversubscribed instance types, and is capable of reverting to on-demand instances when spot prices exceed thresholds. We evaluate the usage of our cost-aware provisioner using four production scientific gateways and show that it can produce cost savings of up to 97.2% when compared to naive provisioning approaches.