Modeling Data Centers as Economic Markets for Dynamic Service Provisioning and Resource Management

Within the computing industry the recent shift in emphasis to service-orientation gives rise to the question: how does delivering computation as a service differ from the way we deliver it today? Simultaneously, there has been a corresponding shift to scale-out, commodity computing platforms which has opened a significant gap in terms of control. To date, the management of services in the enterprise has been left to software developers, who must address the requisite capabilities in isolation. In this paper we propose an approach to allocating a shared pool of physical host computers through the employ of future and spot market semantics. The approach treats computation as a fungible resource whose ownership can be freely exchanged amongst market participants. These methods have been implemented as the virtual service switch which we will present here.