A Highly-Virtualising Cloud Resource Broker

Abstract

Cloud computing infrastructure services encompass temporally, spatially and structurally coarse-grained access to computing resources. This prevents a genuine pay-per-use model for the consumer and effectively leads to over-reservation and inadequate tariffs especially for short-term, small-scale computations. We propose an economically motivated compensation approach to increase the granularity and utility of reserved computation and storage services. The outcome is a highly-virtual sing cloud resource broker. It consists of a fiduciary resource service marketplace and a consumer-configurable virtual machine for resource sharing. The system supports hierarchically nested virtualization with dynamically adjustable resource limits for fine-grained structural, temporal and vertical-spatial scalability. We argue that cloud computing providers should embrace the recently developed hierarchical virtualization and vertical scalability technologies in order to improve the utility and quality of experience for on-demand infrastructure service consumers.