Are Federated Cloud Sharing Systems Sustainable?: On Dynamic Sharing Markets and Their Stability

Recent emergence of the small cloud (SC) has been driven mainly by issues like service cost and complexity of commercial cloud providers. However, the resource inelasticity problem faced by the SCs due to their relatively scarce resources might lead to customer QoS degradation and revenue loss. A proposed solution to this problem recommends sharing of resources between competing SCs to alleviate potential resource inelasticity issues. A recent effort ([28]) proposed SC-Share, a performance-driven static market model for competitive small clouds that results in an efficient market equilibrium jointly optimizing customer QoS satisfaction and SC revenue generation. However, an important question still remains to be answered, without which SC sharing markets may not be guaranteed to sustain in the long-run - is it still possible to achieve a stable market efficient state when the supply of SC resources is dynamic? In this short paper, we take a first step to addressing the problem of efficient market design for single SC resource sharing in dynamic environments. We answer our previous question in the affirmative through the use of Arrow and Hurwicz's disequilibrium process in economics, and the gradient play technique that allows us to iteratively converge upon efficient and stable market equilibria.