Towards Free Market Cloud Computing

Although cloud computing has made great inroads in terms of consumer adoption, we argue that the paradigm still has a long way to go to reach an economically efficient free market state. We highlight four key problems with the current cloud computing approach. These are (1) coarse granularity of service provision, (2) limited control of resources, (3) inadequate support for small providers and prosumers, and (4) vendor lockin via APIs. In this position paper, we briefly outline interesting work that may lead to a solution, in terms of moving towards a more market-based approach to cloud resource allocation.