HARV: Harnessing hybrid virtualization to improve instance (re)usage in public cloud

In the public cloud market, there has been a constant battle over the billing options of the cloud instances between their providers and their users. The users generally have to pay for the entire billing cycle even on fractional usage. Ideally, the residual life-cycles should be resalable by the users, which demands efficient resource consolidation and multiplexing; otherwise, the revenue and use cases are confined by the transient nature of the instances. This paper presents HARV, a novel cloud service that facilitates the management and trade of cloud instances through a third-party platform to run buyers' tasks. The platform relies on hybrid virtualization, an infrastructure layout integrating both the hypervisor-based virtualization and lightweight containerization. It further incorporates a truthful online auction mechanism for instance trading and resource allocation. Our design achieves efficient resource consolidation with no need for provider-level support, and we have deployed a prototype of HARV on the Amazon EC2 public cloud. Our evaluations on both micro-benchmarks and real-life workloads reveal that applications experience negligible performance overhead when hosted on HARV. Trace-driven simulations further show that HARV can achieve substantial cost savings.