<i>FairCloud</i>

The network is a crucial resource in cloud computing, but in contrast to other resources such as CPU or memory, the network is currently shared in a best effort manner. However, sharing the network in a datacenter is more challenging than sharing the other resources. The key difficulty is that the network allocation for a VM X depends not only on the VMs running on the same machine with X, but also on the other VMs that X communicates with, as well as on the cross-traffic on each link used by X. In this paper, we first propose a set of desirable properties for allocating the network bandwidth in a datacenter at the VM granularity, and show that there exists a fundamental tradeoff between the ability to share congested links in proportion to payment and the ability to provide minimal bandwidth guarantees to VMs. Second, we show that the existing allocation models violate one or more of these properties, and propose a mechanism that can select different points in the aforementioned tradeoff between payment proportionality and bandwidth guarantees.