Opportunities in a Federated Cloud Marketplace

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of a federated cloud marketplace that enables distributed resource trading among diverse infrastructures, addressing current limitations of centralized cloud services and highlighting future opportunities.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a federated cloud marketplace, proposing a decentralized ecosystem for resource trading regulated by brokers, and discusses associated challenges and opportunities.

Findings

Distributed infrastructures can serve local users efficiently.

A federated marketplace can expand resource availability globally.

Regulation by brokers ensures service quality and fair trading.

Abstract

Recent measurement studies show that there are massively distributed hosting and computing infrastructures deployed in the Internet. Such infrastructures include large data centers and organizations' computing clusters. When idle, these resources can readily serve local users. Such users can be smartphone or tablet users wishing to access services such as remote desktop or CPU/bandwidth intensive activities. Particularly, when they are likely to have high latency to access, or may have no access at all to, centralized cloud providers. Today, however, there is no global marketplace where sellers and buyers of available resources can trade. The recently introduced marketplaces of Amazon and other cloud infrastructures are limited by the network footprint of their own infrastructures and availability of such services in the target country and region. In this article we discuss the potentials for a federated cloud marketplace where sellers and buyers of a number of resources, including storage, computing, and network bandwidth, can freely trade. This ecosystem can be regulated through brokers who act as service level monitors and auctioneers. We conclude by discussing the challenges and opportunities in this space.