IaaS providers usually cannot provide guarantees of how much steal time will exist, nor can they provide mechanisms to control it. Netflix found the only way it could deal with this issue was to be reactionary. If high steal time was detected on a virtual machine in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Netflix would delete the virtual machine and have it re-created. If the company was lucky, the new virtual machine would be created on a physical machine that was less oversubscribed. This is a sorry state of affairs (Link 2013).
How often were they competing with themselves? Was this just an inefficient way to distribute Netflix evenly across all of ec2?
