Economies of Collaboration in Performance

Present trends in cloud providers (CPs) capabilities have given rise to the interest in federating or collaborating clouds, thus allowing providers to revel on an increased scale and reach more than that is achievable individually. Current research efforts in this context mainly focus on building supply chain collaboration (SCC) models, in which CPs leverage cloud services from other CPs for seamless provisioning. Nevertheless, in the near future, we can expect that hundreds of CPs will compete to offer services and thousands of users will also compete to receive the services to run their complex heterogeneous applications on a cloud computing environment. In this open federation scenario, existing collaboration models (i.e. SCC) are not applicable since they are designed for static environments where a-priori agreements among the parties are needed to establish the federation.