The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The defining characteristic of cloud computing platforms is money. In clouds, non-cooperative clients pay their providers for the shared computing resources they use as they use them. The introduction of monetary compensation thus gives rise to a host of new possibilities for efficiently sharing computing resources. We investigate the economic foundations of cloud computing systems and propose new mechanisms for non-cooperative clients and providers to share cloud resources efficiently. We (1) demonstrate how clients can co-optimize both the run-time and costs of their workloads by running them on the right combination of cloud and grid resources; (2) analyze how the leading cloud provider, Amazon EC2, prices its spare capacity ("spot instances") and show that contrary to popular belief, spot instance prices, supposedly based on supply and demand, were actually artificially generated by Amazon; (3) propose the Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) economic model of cloud computing, where clients pay the right price for the resources they need as they need them; and (4) present a prototype RaaS cloud computing platform that efficiently rents physical memory to non-cooperative clients at a fine-grained time and resource granularity.