Role of predictive modeling in cloud services pricing: A survey

In the era of Big Data analytics predictive modeling plays an important role to predict the future demand and behavior by using historical data. As majority of the IT companies running behind cloud services, the cloud service providers like Amazon, Google cloud, Microsoft Azure etc may be interested to know the future demand of the computing resources so that they can derive new pricing schemes to gain more profit. The providers have different pricing schemes to charge for computing resources e.g., Amazon provides three pricing schemes, namely, on-demand pricing, reserved pricing and auction pricing in the same way Microsoft has different schemes like Pay-As-You-Go Subscriptions, Prepaid Subscriptions. The paper presents survey of role of predictive modeling in cloud service pricing. The survey result clearly shows that predictions made by various author are closer to actual outcomes, which highlights the importance of predictive modeling to forecast future demand of cloud computing resources and deciding the price of resources.