Smart Cloud Marketplace - Agent-based Platform for Trading Cloud Services

Cloud computing services are rapidly gaining popularity with more and more businesses actively migrating to the cloud, and many new cloud providers emerging. In such circumstances, there is a need for a market platform that allows for automated trading of cloud services between numerous independent users. Therefore, in this paper we propose Smart Cloud Marketplace (SCM) as a platform for trading cloud services based on intelligent agent technology. Software agents represent the cloud service consumers and providers in the marketplace, and make intelligent decisions on their behalf. The platform enables participants to use different trading policies in order to automate and improve the efficiency of resource trading. Moreover, SCM supports multimarket trading, where different market mechanisms can be deployed. We have used the SCM platform to test different market mechanisms developed within our research group. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that Smart Cloud Marketplace is a useful, flexible and effective platform for conducting experiments and ultimately for trading cloud services.