Cloud Market Maker: An automated dynamic pricing marketplace for cloud users

• This paper presents Cloud Market Maker (CMM); a marketplace for cloud users.
• The system provides a dynamic pricing marketplace for providers to maximize their revenue.
• It provides users with decision support when choosing a cloud resource.
• It employs a multi-agent multi-auction approach for creating an automated marketplace for cloud users which were not possible with other existing systems.

Cloud providers commonly incur heavy upfront set up costs which remain almost constant whether they serve a single or many customers. In order to generate a return on this investment, a suitable pricing strategy is required by providers. Established industries such as the airlines employ dynamic pricing to maximize their revenues. In order to increase their resource utilization rates, cloud providers could also use dynamic pricing for their services. At present however most providers use static schemes for pricing their resources. This work presents a new dynamic pricing mechanism for cloud providers. Furthermore, at present no platform exists that provides a dynamic unified view of the different cloud offerings in real-time. Due to a rapidly changing landscape and a limited knowledge of the cloud marketplace, consumers can often end up choosing a cloud provider that is more expensive or does not give them what they really need. This is because some providers spend significantly on advertising their services online. In order to assist cloud customers in the selection of a suitable resource and cloud providers in implementing dynamic pricing, this work describes an automated dynamic pricing marketplace and a decision support system for cloud users. We present a multi-agent multi-auction based system through which such services are delivered. An evaluation has been carried out to determine how effectively the Cloud Market Maker selects the resource, dynamically adjusts the price for the cloud users and the suitability of dynamic pricing for the cloud environment.