Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Technische
Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany | Laboratório de Sistemas
Distribuídos, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, CEP 58429-900,
Campina Grande - PB, Brazil
Abstract: The foundation of cloud computing is to leverage virtualised
physical computing resources by offering them on demand as elastic
infrastructure services. Processing, storage and networking resources can thus
be perceived and traded comparable to existing utility services. A restriction
of conventional infrastructure services is the missing flexibility for
scenarios in which coarse-grained provisioning from a single provider is not
sufficient anymore. Cloud federation and multiplexing are recent techniques to
overcome the provider binding and lock-in limitation. In this article, we give
a brief overview about this research direction and then present a new variety,
nested clouds, which helps overcoming the coarse-grained virtualisation,
billing and trading limitations. In particular, we contribute a design for the
Nested Cloud virtual machine and the corresponding spot market
Highly-Virtualising Cloud Resource Broker and report on our experience with
these systems. We argue that nested clouds help consumers in decreasing their
costs and increasing their flexibility for infrastructure services by recycling
and repurposing unused capacities.
