Mandi: a market exchange for trading utility and cloud computing services

The recent development in Cloud computing has enabled the realization of delivering computing as an utility. Many industries such as Amazon and Google have started offering Cloud services on a “pay as you go” basis. These advances have led to the evolution of the market infrastructure in the form of a Market Exchange (ME) that facilitates the trading between consumers and Cloud providers. Such market environment eases the trading process by aggregating IT services from a variety of sources, and allows consumers to easily select them. In this paper, we propose a light weight and platform independent ME framework called “Mandi”, which allows consumers and providers to trade computing resources according to their requirements. The novelty of Mandi is that it not only gives its users the flexibility in terms of negotiation protocol, but also allows the simultaneous coexistence of multiple trading negotiations. In this paper, we first present the requirements that motivated our design and discuss how these facilitate the trading of compute resources using multiple market models (also called negotiation protocols). Finally, we evaluate the performance of the first prototype of “Mandi” in terms of its scalability.