Authors:
Paolo Bonacquisto
;
Giuseppe Di Modica
;
Giuseppe Petralia
and
Orazio Tomarchio
Affiliation:
University of Catania, Italy
Keyword(s):
Cloud Market, Procurement Auction, Bidding Strategy, Cloud Simulations.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Economics
;
Cloud Scenarios
;
Fundamentals
;
Platforms and Applications
Abstract:
Cloud computing technology has definitely reached a high level of maturity. This is witnessed not just by the interest of the academic community around it, but also by the wide adoption in commercial scenarios. Today many big IT players are making huge profits from leasing their computing resources “on-demand”, i.e.,
letting customers ask for the amount of resources they need, and charging them a fixed price for each hour of consumption. Recently, studies authored by economists have criticized the fixed-price applied to cloud resources, claiming that a better pricing model can be devised which may increase profit for both the vendor and the consumer. In this paper we investigate how to apply the mechanism of procurement auction to the problem, faced by providers, of allocating unused resources. In particular, we focus on the strategies providers may adopt in the context of procurement auctions to maximize the utilization of their data centers. We devised a strategy, which dynamically
adapts to changes in the auction context, and which providers may adequately tune to accommodate their business needs. Further, overbooking of resources is also considered as an optional strategy providers may decide to adopt to increase their revenue. Simulations conducted on a testbed showed that the proposed approach is viable.
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