RaaS and Ginseng: The Resource-as-a-Service Cloud and its Implementation

IaaS cloud providers typically sell virtual machines that bundle a fixed amount of resources, such as the core count, the memory size, and the I/O bandwidth. The resource bundles are usually unchanging throughout the lifetime of the virtual machines. Following the likely culmination of recent trends in the construction of IaaS clouds and of the economic forces operating on providers and clients, we foresee that this type of rigid resource allocation will change in the near future. Instead of fixed bundles, cloud providers will increasingly sell resources individually, reprice them, and adjust their quantity every few seconds in accordance with market-driven supply-and-demand conditions; virtual machines will accordingly purchase and utilize the changing resources dynamically, while they are running. We call this nascent cloud model, RaaS, the Resource-as-Service Cloud. We present Ginseng, a first step towards RaaS clouds. Ginseng is the first market-driven cloud system that allocates memory efficiently to selfish cloud clients. Ginseng incentivizes selfish clients to bid their true value for the memory they need when they need it. Ginseng continuously collects client bids, finds an efficient memory allocation, and re-allocates physical memory to the clients that value it the most. Ginseng achieves 6.2-15.8x improvement, which is 83-100% of the optimum, in aggregate client satisfaction when compared with state-of-the-art approaches for cloud memory allocation. Joint work with Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda.