Research into computing resource markets has mainly considered the question of which market mechanisms provide a fair resource allocation. However, while developing such markets, the definition of the unit of trade (i.e. the definition of resource) has not been given much attention. In this...

Cloud computing aims at allowing customers to utilize computational resources and software hosted by service providers. Thus, it shifts the complex and tedious resource and software management tasks typically done by customers to the service providers. Besides promising to eliminate these...