Trading experiments using financial agents in a simulated cloud computing commodity market

In September 2012, Amazon, the leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, launched a secondary marketplace venue for users to buy and sell cloud resources between themselves—the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace (ARIM). ARIM is designed to encourage users to purchase more long-term reserved instances, thus generating more stable demand for the provider and additional revenue through commission on sales. In this paper, we model ARIM using a multi-agent simulation model populated with zero-intelligence plus (ZIP) financial trading agents. We demonstrate that ARIM offers a new opportunity for market makers (MMs) to profit from buying and selling resources, but suggest that this opportunity may be fleeting. We also demonstrate that altering the market mechanism from a retail market (where only sellers post offers; similar to ARIM) to a continuous double auction (where both buyers and sellers post offers) can result in higher sale prices and therefore higher commissions. Since IaaS is a multi-billion dollar industry and currently the fastest growing segment of the cloud computing market, we therefore suggest that Amazon may profit from altering the mechanism of ARIM to enable buyers to post bids.