Use Case—The Amazon EC2 Resource Pool

The Amazon EC2 Resource Pool in Aneka allows integration with Amazon EC2, a popular cloud resource provider. A simple Web service client has been developed in Aneka to interact with EC2, leveraging its web-service-based interface. To interact with EC2, certain parameters are required:

User Identity: This is the account information used to authenticate with Amazon EC2. It consists of an access key and a secret key, which are obtained from the Amazon Web services portal after signing in. These keys are necessary for any operation involving web service access.

Resource Identity: The resource identity is the identifier of a public or private Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that serves as a template for creating virtual machine instances.

Resource Capacity: This specifies the type of instance that will be deployed by EC2. Instance types vary based on the number of cores, amount of memory, and other performance-related settings. Common instance types include small, medium, and large, each with a predefined capacity and associated cost.

The EC2ResourcePool in Aneka uses the Web service client and the provided configuration information to forward requests from the pool manager to EC2. It stores metadata of each active virtual instance for future use.

To optimize the utilization of EC2 instances and minimize costs, the EC2ResourcePool implements a cost-effective optimization strategy. Amazon charges virtual machine instances in one-hour time blocks. If an instance is used for only 30 minutes, the customer is still charged for one hour. To cater to applications with smaller execution time granularity, the pool implements a local cache. Released instances whose time block has not expired yet are kept in the cache and reused instead of provisioning new instances from Amazon.

By employing this cost-effective optimization strategy, the EC2ResourcePool in Aneka can minimize provisioning costs from the Amazon cloud while achieving high utilization of each provisioned resource.

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