Take a penny, leave a penny – Scaling out to off-premise unused cloud resources

Abstract

This work describes a system that enables sharing of cloud resources through a middle-ware layer we call market. It is designed with the requirements: minimal configuration, easy access and sharing in mind. This effort resulted in a platform that provides a common interface to cloud computing resources, hiding implementation details from the users and allowing them to tap into cloud resources from different vendors.The system supports extensible mechanisms to configure virtual machines dispensing the user from error-prone tasks, such as setting up and configuring compute clusters. A simple web based user interface is provided which allows browsing, configuring, launching and managing of virtual machines and virtual clusters. Integrated remote desktop facilities make the virtual computing resources accessible directly from the user interface.