Cloud Federations in the Sky: Formation Game and Mechanism

The amount of computing resources required by current and future data-intensive applications is expected to increase dramatically, creating high demands for cloud resources. The cloud providers´ available resources may not be sufficient enough to cope with such demands. Therefore, the cloud providers need to reshape their business structures and seek to improve their dynamic resource scaling capabilities. Federated clouds offer a practical platform for addressing this service management issue. We introduce a cloud federation formation game that considers the cooperation of the cloud providers in offering cloud IaaS services. Based on the proposed federation formation game, we design a cloud federation formation mechanism that enables the cloud providers to dynamically form a cloud federation maximizing their profit. In addition, the proposed mechanism produces a stable cloud federation structure, that is, the participating cloud providers in the federation do not have incentives to break away from the federation. We analyze the performance of the proposed mechanism by performing extensive experiments. The results of the experiments show that the cloud federation obtained by our proposed mechanism is stable, yielding high profit for the participating cloud providers.