Agents for cloud resource allocation: An amazon EC2 case study

Abstract

Infrastructure-as-a-service consumers are presented with numerous Cloud providers with a wide variety of resources. However, consumers are faced with providers that may offer (even similar) resources at different hourly cost rates, and also that no single provider may have matching resource capabilities to fulfill a highly heterogeneous set of requirements. This work proposes an agent-based approach endowed with the well-known contract net protocol for allocating heterogeneous resources from multiple Cloud providers while selecting the most economical resources. The contributions of this paper are: (i) devising an agent-based architecture for resource allocation in multi-Cloud environments, and (ii) implementing the agent-based Cloud resource allocation mechanism in commercial Clouds using Amazon EC2 as a case study. The Amazon EC2 case study shows that agents can autonomously select and allocate heterogeneous resources from multiple Cloud providers while dynamically sampling resources' allocation cost for selecting the most economical resources. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.