Mandi: A Market Exchange for Trading Utility Computing Services

The recent development in Cloud computing has enabled the realization of delivering computing as utility. A number of companies have started building Cloud and Grid computing environments, and offering access to the resources as a “Pay as you go” basis. This has created a need for a market exchange (ME) that brings providers and consumers together and facilitates their trading. Such market environment eases the process of finding, comparing and buying, since they aggregate goods and services from a variety of sources and display them in a way which is helpful to customers. In this paper we propose a ME framework called “Mandi” that allows consumers and providers to trade computing resources according to their requirements. We first present the ME requirements that motivated our design and discuss how these facilitate trading of compute resources using multiple market models. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the first prototype of “Mandi” in terms of its scalability.