Merkat: A Market-Based SLO-Driven Cloud Platform

Cloud computing brings new service models that offer users more flexibility and better resource control promising to improve the user´s satisfaction in terms of Quality of Service. However, current cloud solutions, in particular above the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer, don´t provide automated solutions that address the Quality of Service users may want for their applications. In this paper we present Merkat, a platform that is capable to dynamically share cloud resources between the different application types using a market-based resource allocation mechanism. Merkat provides fair and maximum resource utilization by allocating fine-grained resource amounts to users proportionally to their communicated value. In the same time, autonomous controllers provide Service Level Objective support by applying elasticity rules to scale the application demand according to user performance objectives. Our experiments show that Merkat is able to efficiently react to changes in application load and user requirements, leading to better user satisfaction.