Social Networking for Sharing Cloud Resources

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, ubiquitous and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. storage, applications, and networks) that can be provisioned with minimal management effort. Despite all these benefits, the sharing of resources with other users is a challenge; cloud providers do not commonly facilitate users in sharing their dedicated resources with others. In developing countries it is often too expensive for people to acquire a virtual machine of their own. Users may therefore wish to manage costs and increase computational resource usage by sharing their instances with others. Sadly it is not easy to do this at present. Social networks provide a structure that allows users to interact and share resources (e.g. pictures and videos) on the basis of a trustworthy relationship (e.g. Friendship). This paper highlights a Cloud Resource Bartering model (CRB-model) for sharing user's computational resources through a social network. In our approach we have linked a social network with the computational cloud to create a social cloud (SC) so that users can share their part of the cloud with their social community. A prototype system has been deployed on a social network by using the bartering resource trading mechanism. It is anticipated that this may help users to share their dedicated resources without the need for money changing hands and different communities.