This paper presents the economic impacts of spot instance service on the cloud service providers (CSPs) and the customers when the CSPs offer it along with the on-demand instance service to the customers. We model the interaction between CSPs and customers as a non-cooperative two-stage dynamic game. Our equilibrium analysis reveals (i) the techno-economic interrelationship between the customers' heterogeneity, resource availability, and CSPs' pricing policy, and (ii) the impacts of the customers' service selection (spot vs. on-demand) and the CSPs' pricing decision on the CSPs' market share and revenue, as well as the customers' utility. The key technical challenges lie in, first, how we capture the strategic interactions between CSPs and customers, and second, how we consider the various practical aspects of cloud services, such as heterogeneity of customers' willingness to pay for the quality of service (QoS) and the fluctuating resource availability. The main contribution of this paper is to provide CSPs and customers with a better understanding of the economic impact caused by a certain price policy for the spot service when the equilibrium price, which from our two-stage dynamic game analysis, is able to set as the baseline price for their spot service.

翻译：本文研究了云服务提供商在提供按需实例服务的同时，引入现货实例服务对提供商与客户产生的经济影响。我们将云服务提供商与客户之间的互动建模为非合作两阶段动态博弈。均衡分析揭示了：（i）客户异质性、资源可用性与云服务提供商定价策略之间的技术经济关联性，以及（ii）客户服务选择（现货vs.按需）与服务提供商定价决策对前者市场份额与收入、后者效用产生的影响。关键技术挑战在于：其一，如何捕捉云服务提供商与客户之间的战略互动；其二，如何纳入云服务的多种实际因素，例如客户对服务质量支付意愿的异质性以及资源的波动性。本文的主要贡献在于，通过两阶段动态博弈分析得出的均衡价格可作为现货服务的基准价格，从而帮助云服务提供商与客户更深入理解特定定价策略对现货服务产生的经济影响。