Truthful Mechanisms For Resource Allocation And Pricing In Clouds

A major challenging problem for cloud providers is designing efficient mechanisms for Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning and allocation. Such mechanisms enable the cloud providers to effectively utilize their available resources and obtain higher profits. Recently, cloud providers have introduced auction-based models for VM provisioning and allocation which allow users to submit bids for their requested VMs. We formulate the dynamic VM provisioning and allocation problem for the auction-based model as an integer program considering multiple types of resources. We then design truthful greedy and optimal mechanisms for the problem such that the cloud provider provisions VMs based on the requests of the winning users and determines their payments. We show that the proposed mechanisms are truthful, that is, the users do not have incentives to manipulate the system by lying about their requested bundles of VM instances and their valuations. We perform extensive experiments using real workload traces in order to investigate the performance of the proposed mechanisms. Our proposed mechanisms achieve promising results in terms of revenue for the cloud provider

Management of Cloud Infastructures: Policy-Based Revenue Optimization

Competition on global markets forces many enterprises to make use of new applications, reduce process times and at the same time cut the costs of their IT-infrastructure. To achieve this, it is necessary to maintain a high degree of flexibility with respect to the IT-infrastructure. Facing this challenge the idea of Cloud computing has been gaining interest lately. Cloud services can be accessed on demand without knowledge of the underlying infrastructure and have already succeeded in helping companies deploy products faster. Using Cloud services the New York Times managed to convert scanned images containing 11 million articles into PDF within 24 hours at a cost of merely 240 US-$. However Cloud providers will only offer their services, if they can realize sufficient benefit. To achieve this, the efficiency of Cloud infrastructure management must be increased. To this end we propose the use of concepts from revenue management and further enhancements