Truthful Online Auction for Cloud Instance Subletting

Despite that IaaS users are busy scaling up/out their cloud instances to meet the ever-increasing demands, the dynamics of their demands, as well as the coarse-grained billing options offered by leading cloud providers, have led to substantial instance underutilization in both temporal and spatial domains. This paper theoretically examines an instance subletting service, where underutilized instances are leased to others within user-specified periods. Serving as a secondary market that complements the existing instance market of IaaS providers,we specifically identify the theoretical challenges in instance subletting services, and design an online auction mechanism tomake allocation and pricing decisions for the instances to besublet. Our mechanism guarantees truthfulness and individualrationality with the best possible competitive ratio. Extensivetrace-driven simulations show that our proposed mechanismachieves significant performance gains in both cost and socialwelfare.