Impact of pay-as-you-go cloud platforms on software pricing and development: A review and case study

Abstract

One of the major highlights of cloud computing concerns the pay-as-you-go pricing model, where one pays according to the amount of resources consumed. Some cloud platforms already offer the pay-as-you-go model and this creates a new scenario in which the rational computing resource consumption gains in importance. In this paper, we address the impact of this new approach in software pricing and software development. Our hypothesis is that hardware consumption may impact directly on the software vendor profit and thus it can be necessary to adapt some software development practices. In this direction, we discuss the need to revise well-established models such as COCOMO II and some aspects related to requirements engineering and benchmarking tools. We also present a case study pointing that disregarding the rational consumption of resources can generate wastes that may impact on the software vendor profit. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.