Dynamic Resource Allocation for Spot Markets in Cloud Computing Environments

The advent of cloud computing promises to provide computational resources to customers like public utilities such as water and electricity. To deal with dynamically fluctuating resource demands, market-driven resource allocation has been proposed and recently implemented by public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon EC2. In this environment, cloud resources are offered in distinct types of Virtual Machines (VMs) and the cloud provider runs an auction-based market for each VM type with the goal of achieving maximum revenue over time.