Smart Pricing of Cloud Resources

This chapter discusses three different approaches on smart pricing of cloud services and resources: virtual machine (VM)‐based pricing, service level agreement (SLA)‐based pricing, and time‐dependent pricing. The price of cloud resource can be determined by three major factors such as demand and supply in current markets, the SLA level cloud servers provided, and the predefined job deadline users required. The chapter proposes the detailed pricing model with respect to these three factors separately. The optimal cloud resource allocation is then obtained to maximize the revenue function formulated by these pricing models. A comparison of overall revenue with heuristic static pricing scheme is shown for each pricing model. The chapter considers the problem of data center net profit optimization (NPO), which aims to maximize the difference between the total revenue from deadline‐dependent pricing and the electricity cost of distributed data centers.