Cloud provider capacity augmentation through automated resource bartering

Abstract

Growing interest in Cloud Computing places a heavy workload on cloud providers which is becoming increasingly difficult for them to manage with their primary datacenter infrastructures. Resource limitations can make providers vulnerable to significant reputational damage and it often forces customers to select services from the larger, more established companies, sometimes at a higher price. Funding limitations, however, commonly prevent emerging and even established providers from making continual investment in hardware speculatively assuming a certain level of growth in demand. As an alternative, they may strive to use the current inter-cloud resource sharing platforms which mainly rely on monetary payments and thus putting pressure on already stretched cash flows. To address such issues, we have designed and implemented a new multi-agent based Cloud Resource Bartering System (CRBS) that fosters the management and bartering of pooled resources without requiring costly financial transactions between providers. Agents in CRBS not only strengthen the trading relationship among providers but also enable them to handle surges in demand with their primary setup. Unlike existing systems, CRBS assigns resources by considering resource urgency which comparatively improves customers' satisfaction and the resource utilization rate by more than 50%.The evaluation results provide evidence that our system assists providers to timely acquire the additional resources and to maintain sustainable service delivery. We conclude that the existence of such a system is economically beneficial for cloud providers and enables them to adapt to fluctuating workloads.

Architecture of a time‐sensitive provisioning system for cloud‐native software

“…Bagchi et al 24 used analytical models and event simulations to perform capacity and load planning of customer workloads while satisfying site‐level service level objectives. Goher et al 25 described a novel capacity planning technique that cloud providers can use when confronted with demand spikes that they cannot instantly fulfill. The method is based on bartering each other's unused inventory rather than incurring hardware investments.…”

Are Federated Cloud Sharing Systems Sustainable?: On Dynamic Sharing Markets and Their Stability

“…Earlier efforts [31,36] proposed coalitional games to form a federation among highly reputed providers to achieve high individual profits and high reputation while maintaining the level of committed QoS. To completely remove costly financial transactions, [21] prioritizes the most urgent requests in a new multi-agent based Cloud Resource Bartering System (CRBS) to maintain consistent service delivery. Similarly to our work, [30] studies a federation formation game but assumes that cloud providers share everything with others, while [25] adopts cooperative game theoretic approaches to model a cloud federation and study the motivation for cloud providers to participate in a federation.…”