Cost in the Cloud Rationalisation and Research Trails

Cloud Computing provides simplicity to its consumers by saving them the efforts to deal with their own infrastructure, environments or software. This simplicity relies on the shifting of problems from the client to the provider, introducing new paradigms (virtualization, scalability, flexibility, pay-per-use, etc.). This simplicity comes with a price for the consumer that may accurately, or not, reflect the costs of the provider. In this paper we propose to identify the different points, in the Cloud Computing architecture, where the costs are generated, how their reduction/optimization are considered, and finally we point-out which of these key points need to be further investigated, according to their foreseeable efficiency.