A Conceptual Framework for Simulating Autonomic Cloud Markets

One of the major challenges facing the Cloud paradigm is the emergence of suitable economic platforms for the trading of Cloud services. Today, many researchers investigate how specific Cloud market platforms can be conceived and in some cases implemented. However, such endeavours consider only specific types of actors, business models, or Cloud abstractions. We argue that market platforms for the Cloud paradigm cannot (yet) be rigidly defined, and require the ability to progress and evolve with the paradigm. In this paper, we discuss an alternative approach: autonomic markets. Autonomic markets automatically adapt to changed environmental conditions based upon a given concept of “performance”. We describe the autonomic MAPE loop in the context of electronic markets and consider the types of a knowledge produced and required for decision making. Finally, we present a conceptual framework for a market simulator, a critical tool for autonomic markets, based upon experiences using the GridSim simulation tool.