The Financialization of Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges

Under competitive pressure to maximize their infrastructure's utilization and revenue, modern cloud platforms are quickly evolving into server markets that offer increasingly sophisticated contracts beyond simple on-demand servers, such as spot, preemptible, burstable, and reserved servers. In parallel, continuing advances in system and network virtualization are making server-time a more fungible commodity. These trends have motivated calls for open cloud commodity markets akin to other commodity markets, e.g., for oil, gold, corn, etc. However, such open cloud markets have not yet materialized due to key differences between cloud resources and other commodities. In particular, the relationship between applications and their underlying server resources is fundamentally different and more complex than other commodities. Unfortunately, software developers generally do not have the necessary background to effectively manage this complexity as part of their applications. Financial cloud computing is an emerging area that focuses on adapting and extending concepts from economics and finance to explicitly manage applications' tradeoffs between cost, risk, availability, and performance in cloud markets. A key goal of financial cloud computing is to develop systems-level abstractions and mechanisms that manage the market's complexity. This paper introduces this emerging area and its potential benefits, surveys related work, discusses challenges to realizing a cloud commodity market, and then outlines future research directions.