Towards value-based resource provisioning in the cloud

With the emergence of cloud computing, enterprises are able to migrate and scale out their workload on public clouds. In order for Cloud providers to fulfill the customer requirements and stay competitive in the market, they should manage efficiently their shared resource pool while applying appropriate pricing schemes for billing their services. In this paper, we analyse the relationship between resource provisioning decisions in the cloud and pricing process to determine the value of the cloud services. As a first step, we explain how cloud providers could apply value-based pricing to increase their revenue. Based on our analysis, we introduce the concept of value-based resource provisioning, which aims to evaluate the direct and indirect impact of resource provisioning decisions to the revenue maximization of a cloud provider. To this end, we present an architecture that enables value-based resource provisioning and we discuss possible solutions and open problems towards the realization of our approach.