Pricing the cloud: a QoS-based auction approach

ABSTRACT

Cloud computing is an evolutionary technology that offers on-demand resources and elastic services through the Internet. Most providers adopt fixed-price mechanisms (e.g. pay-as-you-go). However, a few providers have recently employed auction-like approaches to price cloud services. Meanwhile, cloud consumers pay more attention to Quality of Service (QoS) such as availability, which measures how well a service is performed. This paper proposes a novel auction approach that can efficiently allocate resources according to customers’ QoS preferences. The QoS-based pricing can generate more revenue than a fixed-price strategy. This research lies at the intersection of cloud computing, economics, and information systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Cloud pricing
• Quality of Service (QoS)
• availability
• revenue approximation
• economic efficiency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://cloud.google.com/.

2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/.

3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-purchasing-options.html.

4. Amazon, Amazon EC2 spot instances. URL https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/.