An Auction-driven Self-organizing Cloud Delivery Model

The three traditional cloud delivery models – IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS – constrain access to cloud resources by hiding their raw functionality and forcing us to use them indirectly via a restricted set of actions. Can we introduce a new delivery model, and, at the same time, support improved security, a higher degree of assurance, find relatively simple solutions to the hard cloud resource management problems, eliminate some of the inefficiencies related to resource virtualization, allow the assembly of clouds of clouds, and, last but not least, minimize the number of interoperability standards? We sketch a self-organizing architecture for very large compute clouds composed of many-core processors and heterogeneous coprocessors. We discuss how self-organization will address each of the challenges described above. The approach is bid-centric. The system of heterogeneous cloud resources is dynamically, and autonomically, configured to bid to meet the needs identified in a high-level task or service specification. When the task is completed, or the service is retired, the resources are released for subsequent reuse. Our approach mimics the process followed by individual researchers who, in response to a call for proposals released by a funding agency, organize themselves in groups of various sizes and specialities. If the bid is successful, then the group carries out the proposed work and releases the results. After the work is completed, individual researchers in the group disperse, possibly joining other groups or submitting individual bids in response to other proposals. Similar protocols are common to other human activities such as procurement management.