Trust-aware operation of providers in cloud markets

Abstract

Online Reputation Systems allow markets to exclude providers providers that are untrustworthy or unreliable. System failures and outages may decrease the reputation of honest providers, which would lose potential clients. For that reason, providers require trust-aware management policies aimed at retaining their reputation when unexpected failures occur. This paper proposes policies to operate cloud resources to minimise the impact of system failures in the reputation. On the one side, we discriminate clients under conflicting situations to favour those that would impact more positively the reputation of the provider. On the other side, we analyse the impact of management actions in the reputation and the revenue of the provider to select those with less impact when an actuation is required. The validity of these policies is demonstrated through experiments for various use cases. © 2014 IFIP Internatinal Federation for Information Processing.