Cloud Resellers on Bazaar-Based Cloud Markets

Today, Cloud services such as virtual machines are purchased from provider platforms such as Amazon EC2. Thereby, consumers can choose between pre-configured virtual machines (aka instance types) without negotiating price and SLA terms. More dynamic approaches for trading Cloud services are emerging see e.g. Virtustream where consumers are charged based on so called μVMs or Amazon EC2 spot market where consumers can bid for single virtual machines as well as for fleets of virtual machines. Hence, autonomous bilateral multi-round negotiations (Bazaar-negotiations) are a promising approach for trading services on future Cloud markets. The notion of such a Cloud market is not a simple buyer-seller relationship, there are numerous other intermediaries involved in it. In this paper we elaborate the role of resellers (as an example of an intermediary) from an economical point of view and developed negotiation strategies for them. The introduced concepts are evaluated by simulating Cloud markets with resellers using a CloudSim-based simulation environment which we developed.