Facebook-based cloud resource sharing

Abstract Sharing cloud resources between groups of users is a challenge. Cloud providers do not commonly support users in sharing their spare dedicated resources with others. In developing countries, it is often too expensive for people to acquire a virtual machine of their own. Users may, therefore, wish to manage costs and increase computational resource usage by sharing their instances with others. This paper presents a container based cloud resource bartering (CRB) model for sharing user's computational resources through a social network. In our approach, we have integrated a Facebook account with the computational cloud to enable tenants to share their unused cloud resources with other users. The performance of the proposed prototype is evaluated under different workloads. Based on our experimental results we conclude that the proposed model is well suited for the creation of a low-cost social cloud in developing countries.