An Online Mechanism for Dynamic VM Provisioning and Allocation in Clouds

Current cloud computing providers allocate their virtual machine (VM) instances via fixed price-based or auction-like mechanisms. However, these mechanisms have one limitation, they are all offline mechanisms, therefore they need to collect information and be invoked periodically. In this paper, we address this limitation by designing an online mechanism for dynamic provisioning and allocation of VM instances in clouds. Our proposed mechanism, MOVMPA, is invoked as soon as a user places a request or some VM instances already allocated become available again. When invoked, the mechanism selects users who would be allocated VM instances for the period they requested for, and ensures that those users will continue using those VMs for the entire period requested. We prove that the mechanism is incentive compatible and also investigate its performance through extensive simulation experiments.