Smart Data Pricing

Chapter 18Smart Pricing of Cloud Resources

YU XIANG and TIAN LAN

Large investments have been made in recent years in data centers and cloud computing. A survey by KPMG International [1] in February 2012 shows that more than 50% of senior executives find the most important impact of cloud computing to their business models to be its cost benefits. Accordingly, much research has been focused on demystifying various economic issues in data center and cloud computing, for example, economic and pricing models, cost-optimization techniques, tariff and charging structures, and business objectives.

As in today's clouds the demand for resources in clouds are dynamically fluctuating because of many factors, thus offering fixed resources to all the users regardless of their demands may either not be able to meets some users’ demand or leave some resources wasted. Therefore, one thing attracts most attention in today's Cloud computing is the idea of optimizing the utilization of computing resources among all cloud users, so that the computing resources can be distributed in the most effective manner and restrict the underutilization to a certain level. The intuitive idea to deal with this is that the resources should be regulated by the law of supply and demand, that is, when demand rises but supply remains the same, the price of types of virtual machines (VMs) should go up, and when demand drops, then prices should fall accordingly.

To implement this idea, cloud providers such as Amazon ...