On the Economic Sustainability of Cloud Sharing Systems Are Dynamic Single Resource Sharing Markets Stable?

• Published in: Performance evaluation review 2019-11, Vol.46 (4), p.2-10
• Main Authors: Pal, Ranjan, Ahuja, Aditya, Lin, Sung-Han, Kumar, Abhishek, Golubchik, Leana, Jagadeesan, Nachikethas A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0163-5999
• DOI: 10.1145/3372315.3372317

The recent emergence of the small cloud (SC), both in concept and in practice, has been driven mainly by issues related to service cost and complexity of commercial cloud providers (e.g., Amazon) employing massive data centers. However, the resource inelasticity problem [29] faced by the SCs due to their relatively scarce resources might lead to a potential degradation of customer QoS and loss of revenue. A proposed solution to this problem recommends the sharing of resources between competing SCs to alleviate the resource inelasticity issues that might arise. Based on this idea, a recent e?ort ([18]) proposed SC-Share, a performance-driven static market model for competitive small cloud environments that results in an e?cient market equilibrium jointly optimizing customer QoS satisfaction and SC revenue generation. However, an important question with a non-obvious answer still remains to be answered, without which SC sharing markets may not be guaranteed to sustain in the long-run - is it still possible to achieve a stable market e?cient state when the supply of SC resources is dynamic in nature?. In this paper, we take a? rst step to addressing the problem of e?cient market design for single SC resource sharing in dynamic environments. We answer our previous question in the a?rmative through the use of Arrow and Hurwicz's disequilibrium process [9, 10] in economics, and the gradient play technique in game theory that allows us to iteratively converge upon e?cient and stable market equilibria.