RaaS and Ginseng: The Resource as a Service Cloud

Cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2, would like to have satisfied clients. Who wouldn't? However, in order to maximize their marginal profit, they have to fit the clients on as few machines as possible.
One way providers can maximize clients' satisfaction while making best use of the resources is by renting precious physical memory to those clients who value it the most. But real-world cloud clients are selfish; they will only tell their providers the truth about how much they value memory when it is in the clients' best interest to do so. How, then, can cloud providers allocate memory efficiently to those (selfish) clients?
We present Ginseng, the first market-driven cloud system that solves this problem, allocating memory efficiently precisely to those selfish cloud clients who value it the most. Ginseng, built using the KVM hypervisor and libvirt, achieves a 6.2x-15.8x improvement (83%-100% of the optimum) in aggregate client satisfaction.