Dynamic Pricing in Cloud Markets: Evaluation of Procurement Auctions

One of the fundamental principles which cloud computing paradigm builds upon is that resources in the cloud may be accessed "on-demand", i.e., when they are required and for just the time they are required. This intrinsic technologic feature encouraged the cloud commercial providers to adopt the pay-per-use pricing mechanism as it turned to be the most convenient and the easiest to implement. Though pay-per-use ensures significant incomes to providers, still providers experience an underutilization of their computing capacity. It is a matter of fact that unemployed resources represent both a missed income and a cost to providers. In this paper a procurement auction market is proposed as an alternative sell mechanism to maximize the utilization rate of providers' datacenters. Benefits for the providers are achieved through the use of an adaptive strategy that can be easily tuned to cater for the provider's own business needs. Also, in the paper the resort to resource overbooking within the provider's strategy has been analyzed. The proposal's viability was finally proved through simulation tests conducted on the Cloudsim simulator.