Rent or self-execute? Resource management strategies for cloud providers

As Cloud Computing is an emerging field, many improvements are being proposed to provide users with better services and facilities. This paper deals with the illusion of infinite resource availability on demand, one of the aspect in Cloud Computing. A new approach has been discussed here to continue providing this illusion. This work provides an efficient way for the cloud provider to decide on his strategies to execute a job i.e., whether to use his own services to execute (self-execute) or to pay rent to other cloud providers. A utility function has been formulated that considers the factors related to resource requirement, execution time and waiting probability. Further, a combination of forecasting models and game theoretic approaches have been proposed to identify the best strategy based on the values from this utility function. The design considers both the previous as well as current demand to decide on the provider's strategy so as to make the results more accurate. The results obtained show an almost equal distribution of Rent and Self-execute strategies.