A Commodity-Focused Multi-cloud Marketplace Exemplar Application

The cloud model is of increasing importance to next generation network-centric applications in that it enables dynamic, scalable, resilient and cost effective solutions to be deployed and managed. The resources within a cloud can be owned or from a utility resource provider or indeed a combination of both. We have been developing and managing a large multi-provider cloud in field deployment for broadcasting applications with an active user community for several years that uses owned resources and resources bought from commercial providers. With the availability of large-scale resources from the increasing number of utility providers, mechanisms are required to enable resources to be added to and removed from clouds in an automated and application-centric way. We use a resource commodity market approach to managing resources within our cloud that is used to define which resources should be used and for how long they should be used and that monitors the performance of resources in an attempt to optimise cloud costs. This model is application centric because how the cost of a resource is calculated is specified by the application. Our cloud interface approach has some similarity with existing inter cloud work however it is distinct in that providers remain unaware of and uncooperative with each other: they form a marketplace through which users can exploit price variation to maximise their profit for their current workload.