Resources as a service cloud on the horizon, researchers predict

Today's IaaS (infrastructure, services) cloud platform allows customers to lease virtual servers and storage resources on demand, typically on an hourly basis. But in the future, such services may sell special resources in more efficient, granular ways, such as CPU cycles and memory, with a lease that can be as short as a few seconds.

An opinion paper written by the Israeli Institute of Technology researchers, Orna Agmon Yehuda, Muli Yehuda, Assaf Schuster and Dan Tsafrir on the subject, calls such services Raas (resources as services), The paper will be read at the Usenix Hotcloud ' 12 Conference in Boston next week.

Over time, the concept of owning computational resources has become obsolete, the paper said. "Before the advent of cloud computing, the average usage cycle for a single server was about three years." With the advent of web hosting, customers can rent servers on a monthly basis. "Then there were services like Amazon EC2, which shortened the lease period to an hourly lease.

The researchers point out that, as the cloud computing market matures, the hourly-renting model is not enough.

"If you pay for a virtual machine by the hour, it is generally possible that half an hour is wasted," the paper said. If you charge in seconds, you may only waste half a second or so. ”

Some cloud providers have started selling less than one hour of service, while other IaaS leasing practices, such as fixed bundling patterns for computing power, memory and network resources, are "also being considered for unbundling", the researchers note.

"Amazon now allows customers to add or remove different ' network instances ' and ' block instances ' on virtual machines running. CLOUDSIGMA provides customers the ability to flexibly build different bundles of services using a variety of resources, sort of like DIY a server with CPU, memory, and I/O devices. ”

In the Raas cloud, customers can buy "seed virtual machines" that contain some basic resources and an "economic agent" to add additional capacity. The agent "makes decisions based on the current price of the resource, changing the load that the virtual machine can handle, and the customer can make a subjective assessment of these different resources at different points in time." ”

The cloud service provider's software can also assist economic agents in expressing their interest. The customer agent can also contract with other agents controlled by other customers who have the surplus resources to sell.

The pricing of various resources should be determined according to the market supply and demand relationship. This approach can also be used in SLA agreements. "If the supply fails to serve all customers, the provider can have lower priority SLAs (such as only 90% availability) to meet customers and increase resource prices," the researchers said. ”

To make the concept of Raas cloud a reality, new applications and system software types are needed, researchers say. "In the Raas cloud, the virtual machine does not know the exact number of resources available at any given time." This requires software running on these virtual machines to adapt to changing resource availability, as long as resources are available. ”