Enabling Customer-Provided Resources for Cloud Computing: Potentials, Challenges, and Implementation

Recent years have witnessed cloud computing as an efficient means for providing resources as a form of utility. Driven by the strong demands, industrial pioneers have offered commercial cloud platforms, mostly datacenter-based, which are known to be powerful and effective. Yet, as the cloud customers are pure consumers, their local resources, though abundant, have been largely ignored. In this paper, We present SpotCloud, a real working system that seamlessly integrates the customers' local resources into the cloud platform, enabling them to sell, buy, and utilize these resources. We also investigate the potentials and challenges towards enabling customer-provided resources for cloud computing. Given that these local resources are highly heterogeneous and dynamic, we closely examine two critical challenges in this new context: (1) How can the customers be motivated to contribute or utilize such resources? and (2) How can high service availability be ensured out of the dynamic resources? We demonstrate a distributed market for potential sellers to flexibly and adaptively determine their resource prices through a repeated seller competition game. We also present an optimal resource provisioning algorithm that ensures service availability with minimized lease and migration costs. The evaluation results indicate it as a flexible and less expensive complement to the pure datacenter-based cloud.