Co-Operative Resource Allocation: Building an Open Cloud Market Using Shared Infrastructure

In this paper we present DRIVE, a distributed service-based system designed to facilitate an open economic market for federating Cloud providers. To address the challenges associated with market ownership and operation we propose the use of a co-operative (co-op) infrastructure in which the services that make up DRIVE are hosted across participants' resources. To prevent malicious behavior we use cryptographic, secure and privacy preserving allocation protocols as a means of establishing trust in the allocation infrastructure. We investigate through simulation the effect of different strategies, pricing functions, and penalty models on allocation performance and revenue, and show that the overhead of running DRIVE's services on commodity infrastructure is modest.