Abstract: Current cloud computing providers allocate their virtual machine (VM) instances via fixed price-based or auction-like mechanisms.However,most of these algorithms require static supply virtual machine,and they are unable to accurately predict the user demand,lead to underutilization of resources.To this end,an auction-based algorithm for dynamic VM provisioning and allocation was proposed that takes into account the user demand for VMs when making VM provisioning decisions.The algorithm treats the set of available computing resource as ‘liquid’ resources that can be configured into different numbers and types of VM instances depending on the requests of the users,and the proposed algorithm determines the allocation strategy based on the users’ valuations until all resources are allocated.Our mechanism is evaluated by performing simulation experiments using traces of real workload from parallel workload archive,the results show that the proposed method can guarantee to bring the higher income for cloud providers,and improve the resource utilization rate.

Key words: Cloud computing,Virtual machine instances,Auction,Allocation,Cloud providers,Resource utilization rate