Improving profit through cloud federation

This paper addresses profit optimization through insourcing and outsourcing virtual resources (seen as VMs) for cloud infrastructure providers. A linear program is proposed to assist IaaS providers, involved in a cloud federation, in adjusting their hosting and cooperation decisions in response to their workloads and available resources. The proposed exact formulation takes into account the prices and quotas proposed by the federation members and the costs of resources and their networking to maximize providers revenues. The algorithm performance evaluation and the identified benefits show the conditions for profitable cloud federations and the efficiency of the proposed model in improving profit.