I recently noticed a surprising lack of new features being announced for AWS spot market. This disappoints me, as I have had high hopes for this groundbreaking idea since it was initially launched. Assuming spot price is set only through supply and demand, I think the following 3 suggestions could...

Last week I came across an interesting post on Amazon EC2 spot price spikes published on GigaOm. In the comments, in response to a question from a reader, the author stated that “I don’t think anyone ever expected that the market would behave like this.” I have been interested in...

When Amazon Web Services launched EC2 spot instances in December 2009, I was very excited about the beginnings of potential revolution in how computing resources could be priced, bought and sold. I have followed this unprecedented phenomenon with great interest, blogging my thoughts along the way. But today, over 1.5...

This is part 4 of my pricing in the cloud series. Exactly one year ago - on Monday, December 14, 2009 - Amazon Web Services launched spot pricing as a new feature of Amazon EC2. In a nutshell, spot pricing is a dynamic pricing scheme for EC2 instances. At each...

If you have been following my blog for a while, you may recall a post from earlier this year where I looked at some basic statistical properties of time series behind Amazon EC2 spot price history. Because EC2 regions are completely separate and independent, you’d think spot price history for...

In December 2009, Amazon Web Services team introduced yet another innovation - spot pricing for EC2 instances. Several sites were created shortly to track spot price history by creating price charts. But price charts are relatively boring - juicy meat is in the dynamics hidden inside series of numbers which...