Incentive-Compatible Online Mechanisms for Resource Provisioning and Allocation in Clouds

Cloud providers provision their various resources such as CPUs, memory, and storage in the form of Virtual Machine (VM) instances which are then allocated to the users. We design online mechanisms for VM provisioning and allocation in clouds that consider several types of available resources. Our proposed online mechanisms make no assumptions about future demand of VMs, which is the case in real cloud settings. The proposed mechanisms are invoked as soon as a user places a request or some of the allocated resources are released and become available. The mechanisms allocate VM instances to selected users for the period they are requested for, and ensure that the users will continue using their VM instances for the entire requested period. In addition, the mechanisms determine the payment the users have to pay for using the allocated resources. We prove that the mechanisms are incentive-compatible, that is, they give incentives to the users to reveal their true valuations for their requested bundles of VM instances. We investigate the performance of our proposed mechanisms through extensive experiments.