EVRC: An economic-based virtual resource co-allocation middleware for clouds

In cloud platforms, resource co-allocation service plays an important role on meeting user's requirements especially for running some large-scale applications, which typically need to be deployed on several virtual organisations. In this paper, we present an economic-based virtual resource co-allocation (EVRC) middleware, which provides a set of flexible services that allows cloud applications co-allocating plenty of virtual resources across different resource providers. In the EVRC framework, resource co-allocation service is implemented by a novel auction mechanism, and cloud user's quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are guaranteed by a set of services including resource reservation, reputation manager and etc. In addition, the proposed EVRC middleware is incorporated with an online performance monitoring and profiling mechanism, which can be used to evaluate the efficiency of underlying resources and adjust up-level resource management policy. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the EVRC middleware, and the results indicate that it can significantly improve the efficiency of virtual resource co-allocation as well as cloud user's QoS satisfactory. Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.