  Growing interest in Cloud Computing places a heavy workload on cloud
providers which is becoming increasingly difficult for them to manage with
their primary datacenter infrastructures. Resource limitations can make
providers vulnerable to significant reputational damage and it often forces
customers to select services from the larger, more established companies,
sometimes at a higher price. Funding limitations, however, commonly prevent
emerging and even established providers from making continual investment in
hardware speculatively assuming a certain level of growth in demand. As an
alternative, they may strive to use the current inter-cloud resource sharing
platforms which mainly rely on monetary payments and thus putting pressure on
already stretched cash flows. To address such issues, we have designed and
implemented a new multi-agent based Cloud Resource Bartering System (CRBS) that
fosters the management and bartering of pooled resources without requiring
costly financial transactions between providers. Agents in CRBS not only
strengthen the trading relationship among providers but also enable them to
handle surges in demand with their primary setup. Unlike existing systems, CRBS
assigns resources by considering resource urgency which comparatively improves
customers satisfaction and the resource utilization rate by more than 50%.The
evaluation results provide evidence that our system assists providers to timely
acquire the additional resources and to maintain sustainable service delivery.
We conclude that the existence of such a system is economically beneficial for
cloud providers and enables them to adapt to fluctuating workloads.
