Strategy-Proof Mechanisms for Resource Management in Clouds

The ever-growing demand for cloud resources places the resource management at the heart of the design and decision-making processes in cloud computing environments. Cloud providers offer heterogeneous resources such as CPUs, memory, and storage in the form of Virtual Machine (VM)instances. Recently, cloud providers have introduced auction-based models to sell their unutilized resources in an auction market which allow users to submit bids for their requested VMs. In this PhD dissertation, we address the problem of autonomic VM provisioning and allocation for the auction-based model considering multiple types of resources by designing exact and approximation mechanisms. The mechanisms also determine the payment the users have to pay for using the allocated resources. Furthermore, our proposed mechanisms drive the system into an equilibrium in which the users do not have incentives to manipulate the system by untruthfully reporting their VM bundle requests and valuations.