Cloud spot instance price prediction using k NN regression

Cloud computing can provide users with basic hardware resources, and there are three instance types: reserved instances, on-demand instances and spot instances. The price of spot instance is lower than others on average, but it fluctuates according to market demand and supply. When a user requests a spot instance, he/she needs to give a bid. Only if the bid is not lower than the spot price, user can obtain the right to use this instance. Thus, it is very important and challenging to predict the price of spot instance. To this end, we take the most popular and representative Amazon EC2 as a testbed, and use the price history of its spot instance to predict future price by building a k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) regression model, which is based on our mathematical description of spot instance price prediction problem. We compare our model with Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine Regression (SVR), Random Forest (RF), Multi-layer Perception Regression (MLPR), gcForest, and the experiments show that our model outperforms the others.