The Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) Cloud

Over the next few years, a new model of buying and selling cloud computing resources will evolve. Instead of providers exclusively selling server equivalent virtual machines for relatively long periods of time (as done in today's IaaS clouds), providers will increasingly sell individual resources (such as CPU, memory, and I/O resources) for a few seconds at a time. We term this nascent economic model of cloud computing the Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) cloud, and we argue that its rise is the likely culmination of recent trends in the construction of IaaS clouds and of the economic forces operating on both providers and clients.