Analysis of overhead and profitability in nested cloud environments

The on-demand provisioning of computing and storage resources and the corresponding pay-as-you-go billing have made cloud computing a popular paradigm to achieve a high technological utility. While most use cases can adequately be covered by the offers of existing public cloud providers, the granularity in provisioning and pricing is not high enough for several task execution scenarios. Nested cloud environments are among the concepts to circumvent these problems. They let consumers manage their allocations with a higher degree of flexibility, including the reselling or repurposing to other sub-consumers. In this paper, we take a critical look at the state of the art of nesting technologies and reason about the resource consumption overhead and the resulting economic profitability of employing a nested cloud. The results are validated within a cloud resource broker.