Part II. A new pricing model in cloud brokering

Abstract

The most popular pricing models used by the current cloud providers are: pay-as-you-go and subscription-based. Pay-as-you-go involves a high price per unit hour but does not require long-term commitment. The subscription-based pricing models are cheaper than pay-as-you-go in the long-term but normally require a long-term commitment and associated vendor lock-in. In this chapter, the currently employed pricing models in cloud computing are briefly described (Section 4). Advance Reservations (ARs), an efficient way to guarantee the availability of a given amount of resources for use at a specific time in the future, are studied (Section 4). Then, the concept of pay-as-you-book (Section 4), a novel manner of acquiring cloud resources in advance for future use based on ARs, is presented. Pay-as-you-book combines the main advantages presented in pay-as-you-go and subscription-based pricing models: no long-term commitment and low cost, respectively. At the end of this chapter, a case study comparing the impact of different resource allocation policies on the economies of a Virtual Cloud Provider (VCP) is developed (Section 4).