Decision model for provisioning virtual resources in Amazon EC2

Nowadays computing resources can be acquired from IaaS cloud providers in different purchasing options. Taking Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for instance, there are three purchasing models, and each option has different price and yields different benefit to clients. The issue that we address in this paper is how cloud users could make a provisioning plan for computing resources. We propose a model which is based on the characteristics of three purchasing options provided by Amazon EC2, which can be used for guiding the capacity planning activity.