OFM: An Online Fisher Market for Cloud Computing

Currently, cloud computing is a primary enabler of new paradigms such as edge and fog computing. One open issue is the pricing of services or resources. Current pricing schemes are usually oligopolistic and not fair. In this work, we propose OFM, an online learning based marketplace that dynamically determines the price for arbitrary resource types based on supply and demand existing at that period. Unlike state of the art solutions, OFM can handle an arbitrary number of customers and resource types at every instance of time. It further performs integral allocation of resources and thereby avoids the unbounded integrality gap. We evaluate OFM with both real and synthetic datasets to reflect varying buying interests, the number of resources sold and market volatility to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution for several realistic scenarios. We observe that (i) OFM achieves about 95% of optimal prices and maximizes the Nash social welfare (NSW); (ii) OFM converges faster and works with different data distributions; and (iii) OFM scales for a large number of resources and buyers and computational time is in the order of microseconds, making it applicable for real-time use cases especially in edge markets.