RaaS (Resource-as-a-Service): More efficient, more granular, shorter lease

Today's IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud platform requires customers to rent virtual servers and storage resources on demand, usually by the hour. But in the future, cloud services will sell some special resources in a more efficient and granular way, just like CPU cycles and memory, and the lease can be as short as a few seconds.

An opinion paper on this topic, prepared in collaboration with a few researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Assaf Schuster and Dan Tsafrir, names such services RaaS (Resource as a Service ), Which is being read out at USENIX HotCloud '12 in Boston next week.

The paper claims that over time, the concept of owning computing resources has become obsolete. "Before the advent of cloud computing, the average life cycle of buying a server was about three years or so. With the advent of Web hosting, customers were able to rent servers on a monthly basis." Services such as Amazon's EC2 followed up with the lease, Shortened to rental by hour.

The researchers point out that as the cloud computing market matures, the hourly rental model is no longer sufficient.

The paper states, "If you pay for a virtual machine on an hourly basis, it can be a waste of half an hour in general, and you may have to waste half a second if you charge by the second."

The researchers point out that some cloud providers have started selling less than an hour of service, while others are leveraging the IaaS lending practices, such as the fixed bundling model of computing power, memory, and network resources, and are "also considering spin-offs."

"Amazon now allows customers to add or remove different 'network instances' and 'block instances' from running virtual machines. CloudSigma offers customers the ability to flexibly build different bundled services with a variety of resources, a bit similar to Use CPU, memory and I / O devices like DIY one server. "

In the RaaS cloud, customers can purchase "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 and alters the load the virtual machine can handle, and customers can subjectively evaluate these different resources at different points in time."

Cloud service provider software can also help economic agents express their interest. Client agents can also contract with other agents under the control of other customers with excess resources for sale.

The pricing of various resources should be determined according to the market supply and demand. This idea can also be used for the SLA protocol. The researchers said: "If the supply can not serve all customers, then providers can lower priority SLA (for example, only 90% availability) to meet customers and increase resource prices."

Researchers say new types of applications and system software are needed to make the RaaS cloud concept a reality. "In the RaaS cloud, virtual machines do not know the exact amount of resources available at any one time, which requires software running on those virtual machines to adapt to changing resource availability and take advantage of the resources available."