Methods and Apparatus for Coordinating and Selecting Protocols for Resources Acquisition from Multiple Resource Managers

Techniques are disclosed for allocation of resources under the control of resource managers and the choice and coordination of resource acquisition protocols to communicate with these resource managers. The resource managers may be distributed and heterogeneous. For example, a technique for use by a service provider for allocating one or more resources from multiple resources associated with multiple resource managers based on at least one service agreement offer from a service client comprises the following steps/operations. At least one service agreement offer is obtained. A resource allocation is automatically determined based on the obtained service agreement offer. The automated step/operation of determining the resource allocation comprises: (i) coordinating selection of a resource acquisition protocol from among multiple resource acquisition protocols for use in communicating with the multiple resource managers to acquire one or more resources associated therewith; and (ii) evaluating a performance associated with one or more of the multiple resource acquisition protocols.