Following is the claim for this invention: -

1. In this invention we have a set of virtual machines in one domain (or they have Internet Protocol Addresses with a common suffix) providing a catalogue of different cloud services and applications which customers can buy. Customers can get a list of services and applications they can launch in their cloud by sending a request to one of the virtual machines in the seller domain. The catalogue of services and applications is like a hash table with unique name for services or applications and the value will be the binary to launch the service or application, commands to execute the same and any other parameters required or to be provided by the user, any prerequisites required for the service or the application to be launched (like any auxiliary software to be installed), environment in which the application or service can run, user privileges required to run the service or application, metadata about the services or applications like their versions, new features, backward compatibility, rollback

functionality if provided, procedure to handle upgrade scenarios, procedure to handle service or application failures and to stop the service or application, etc. The above catalogue of services or applications is a distributed hash table with key-value pairs distributed for look up among the nodes or virtual machines in the seller domain and each virtual machine has information of about what part of Distributed Hash Table is handled by which virtual machine as the keys are ordered in alphabetical manner. Hence to handle requests from customers each virtual machine maintains a hash table (or there is a common hash table shared among the virtual machines) of prefix range of service or application name the virtual machine is handling as the key and the Internet Protocol (IP) address of that virtual machine as the value. To handle buy requests from customers the virtual machine forwards the request to the appropriate virtual machine in the seller domain having information about the service or application if it does not have the information for that service.

Similarly to handle requests to enlist the services or applications from customers the virtual machine broadcasts the request to all virtual machines in the seller domain and aggregates their responses and sends the aggregated response to the customer. The above novel technique of selling applications and services for running in the cloud set up of the customer is the claim for this invention.