Virtual Machine Placement in Non-Cooperative Cloud Federation-Alliance

Many inter-cloud organizations have been proposed to overcome the current limitations of cloud computing, such as service interruption, lack of interoperability, and degradation of services. One such multi-cloud architecture is the cloud federation, where multiple geographically distributed autonomous service providers voluntarily agree to share resources governed by a well-defined set of rules. Although federation offers numerous benefits for the service providers, sharing resources is supervised using a strict set of protocols offering limited flexibility. Hence, this paper proposes a relaxed resources sharing model for the service providers called cloud federation-alliance. The formation of the alliance is modeled as a non-cooperative game among the service providers. The game's stability and the alliance's performance loss are also studied using price-of-stability (PoS) and price-of-anarchy (PoA), respectively. A modified best-fit placement strategy is focused on reducing the power consumed. To assess the performance of the alliance placement, we compare its performance with random and worst-fit allocation techniques. This work aims to build a stable, sustainable, multi-cloud federation alliance and address this structure's critical issues. Extensive simulation results show stability between 2% and 30% with varying workloads.