Pricing the Cloud: An Auction Approach

Cloud computing has changed the processing and service modes of information communication technology and has affected the transformation, upgrading and innovation of the IT-related industry systems. The rapid development of cloud computing in business practice has spawned a whole new field of interdisciplinary, providing opportunities and challenges for business management research. One of the critical factors impacting cloud computing is how to price cloud services. An appropriate pricing strategy has important practical means to stakeholders, especially to providers and customers. This study addressed and discussed research findings on cloud computing pricing strategies, such as fixed pricing, bidding pricing, and dynamic pricing. Another key factor for cloud computing is Quality of Service (QoS), such as availability, reliability, latency, security, throughput, capacity, scalability, elasticity, etc. Cloud providers seek to improve QoS to attract more potential customers; while, customers intend to find QoS matching services that do not exceed their budget constraints. Based on the existing study, a hybrid QoS-based pricing mechanism, which consists of subscription and dynamic auction design, is proposed and illustrated to cloud services. The results indicate that our hybrid pricing mechanism has potential to better allocate available cloud resources, aiming at increasing revenues for providers and reducing expenses for customers in practice

Generic Methods for Adaptive Management of Service Level Agreements in Cloud Computing

The adoption of cloud computing to build and deliver application services has been nothing less than phenomenal. Service oriented systems are being built using disparate sources composed of web services, replicable datastores, messaging, monitoring and analytics functions and more. Clouds augment these systems with advanced features such as high availability, customer affinity and autoscaling on a fair pay-per-use cost model. The challenge lies in using the utility paradigm of cloud beyond its current exploit. Major trends show that multi-domain synergies are creating added-value service propositions. This raises two questions on autonomic behaviors, which are specifically ad- dressed by this thesis. The first question deals with mechanism design that brings the customer and provider(s) together in the procurement process. The purpose is that considering customer requirements for quality of service and other non functional properties, service dependencies need to be efficiently resolved and legally stipulated. The second question deals with effective management of cloud infrastructures such that commitments to customers are fulfilled and the infrastructure is optimally operated in accordance with provider policies. This thesis finds motivation in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to answer these questions. The role of SLAs is explored as instruments to build and maintain trust in an economy where services are increasingly interdependent. The thesis takes a wholesome approach and develops generic methods to automate SLA lifecycle management, by identifying and solving relevant research problems. The methods afford adaptiveness in changing business landscape and can be localized through policy based controls. A thematic vision that emerges from this work is that business models, services and the delivery technology are in- dependent concepts that can be finely knitted together by SLAs. Experimental evaluations support the message of this thesis, that exploiting SLAs as foundations for market innovation and infrastructure governance indeed holds win-win opportunities for both cloud customers and cloud providers

The Contemporary Affirmation of Taxonomy and Recent Literature on Workflow Scheduling and Management in Cloud Computing

The Cloud computing systemspreferred over the traditional forms of computing such as grid computing, utility computing, autonomic computing is attributed forits ease of access to computing, for its QoS preferences, SLA2019;s conformity, security and performance offered with minimal supervision. A cloud workflow schedule when designed efficiently achieves optimalre source sage, balance of workloads, deadline specific execution, cost control according to budget specifications, efficient consumption of energy etc. to meet the performance requirements of today2019; svast scientific and business requirements. The businesses requirements under recent technologies like pervasive computing are motivating the technology of cloud computing for further advancements. In this paper we discuss some of the important literature published on cloud workflow scheduling

Optimal Workload Allocation for Distributed Edge Clouds With Renewable Energy and Battery Storage

This paper studies an optimal workload allocation problem for a network of renewable energy-powered edge clouds that serve users located across various geographical areas. Specifically, each edge cloud is furnished with both an on-site renewable energy generation unit and a battery storage unit. Due to the discrepancy in electricity pricing and the diverse temporal-spatial characteristics of renewable energy generation, how to optimally allocate workload to different edge clouds to minimize the total operating cost while maximizing renewable energy utilization is a crucial and challenging problem. To this end, we introduce and formulate an optimization-based framework designed for Edge Service Providers (ESPs) with the overarching goal of simultaneously reducing energy costs and environmental impacts through the integration of renewable energy sources and battery storage systems, all while maintaining essential quality-of-service standards. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and solution in maintaining service quality as well as reducing operational costs and emissions. Furthermore, the impacts of renewable energy generation and battery storage on optimal system operations are rigorously analyzed

Automated Analysis of Cloud Offerings for Optimal Service Provisioning

Cloud computing paradigm has brought an overwhelming variety of cloud services from different providers, each one offering a plethora of configuration and purchasing options for them. Users may have certain requirements and preferences not only concerning service configuration, but also with respect to their usage schedule. In this situation, an appropriate provisioning plan considering all restrictions would help users to achieve their goals while taking into account the different available providers, their pricing and even the usage discounts they provide. In this work, we describe an automated solution that analyzes user needs that include scheduling restrictions to obtain optimized provisioning plans for different cloud providers, which allow users to compare several offerings that possibly consider volume or usage discounts. We validate this solution against a realistic use case, while also providing a prototype implementation in the form of publicly available microservices.Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad TIN2015-70560-RJunta de Andalucía P12-TIC-186