Bid-centric service descriptions have the potential to offer a new cloud service provisioning model that promotes portability, diversity of choice and differentiation between providers. A bid matching model based on requirements and capabilities is presented that provides the basis for such an approach. In order to facilitate the bidding process, tenders should be specified as abstractly as possible so that the solution space is not needlessly restricted. To this end, we describe how partial TOSCA service descriptions allow for a range of diverse solutions to be proposed by multiple providers in response to tenders. Rather than adopting a lowest common denominator approach, true portability should allow for the relative strengths and differentiating features of cloud service providers to be applied to bids. With this in mind, we describe how TOSCA service descriptions could be augmented with additional information in order to facilitate heterogeneity in proposed solutions, such as the use of coprocessors and provider-specific services.
In this paper, we present a novel combinatorial auction (CA) based trading infrastructure to enable the supply and demand of Cloud services from different Cloud providers (CP). We propose a new auction policy that considers the relationship among CPs (mutual business relationship) in bidding mechanism. In our new auction-based market model, we allow the group of service providers to publish their bids collaboratively as a single bid to the auctioneer. It gives service providers a chance to autonomously find partners and make groups. Then they can use group strategy to increase their competitive power and compete for winning the bid (s). This will reduce conflicts, as well as collaboration cost and negotiation time, among participants as compare to existing CA-based market model. We implement our proposed market model of trading service in a simulated environment and study its economic efficiency with existing model. Cloud computing has been an emerging model which aims at allowing customers to utilize computing resources hosted by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). More and more consumers rely on CSPs to supply computing and storage service on the one hand, and CSPs try to attract consumers on favorable terms on the other. In such competitive cloud computing markets, pricing policies are critical to market efficiency. While CSPs often publish their prices and charge users according to the amount of resources they consume, auction mechanism is rarely applied. In fact a feasible auction mechanism is the most effective method for allocation of resources, especially double auction is more efficient and flexible for it enables buyers and sellers to enter bids and offers simultaneously. In this paper we bring up an electronic auction platform for cloud, and a cloud Continuous Double Auction (CDA) mechanism is formulated to match orders and facilitate trading based on the platform. Some evaluating criteria are defined to analyze the efficiency of markets and strategies. Furthermore, the selection of bidding strategies for the auction plays a very important role for each player to maximize its own profit, so we developed a novel bidding strategy for cloud CDA, BH-strategy, which is a two-stage game bidding strategy. At last we designed three simulation scenarios to compare the performance of our strategy with other dominating bidding strategies and proved that BH-strategy has better performance on surpluses, successful transactions and market efficiency. In addition, we discussed that our cloud CDA mechanism is feasible for cloud computing resource allocation.