A crowd-sourced cloud environment allows for, and benefits from, modes of interaction between among the service providers (including the “resource providers” and the “cloud provider”) and consumers (also referred to herein as “tenants”) that are not practiced in a DC-centric cloud environment—specifically, the use of Internet-based social networking technology and Internet-based online marketplace technology to facilitate resource pooling and interaction between crowd-sourced cloud resource providers, the cloud provider, and crowd-sourced cloud consumers.