A General Cost Model in a Cloud Data Center

Abstract

Cloud Computing is one of the technologies with a rapid development in recent years. This technology provides many services and resources to end users at low prices. Last decade witnessed a growing interest from industry and academia in the study of problems arising in cloud computing. A major condition for the commercial success of a business in cloud data centers is the formulation of a well-defined pricing strategy. Pricing models play a key role in the services purchase decision of the potential cloud customers. On the cloud market there are numerous Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that offer users various pricing models for storage, databases, memory, and applications. Cloud pricing models are depending on the cloud type: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). The present paper provides an overview on various price models present in the cloud market with price comparisons for the three main CSPs: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. A general cost model is then proposed for computing the services costs in a Data Center. This model can be used by the manager to make comparisons between the cost of his own Data Center services and the cost of the same CSPs services computed according to the CSPs pricing models. For different types of hardware configurations different electricity consumption is taken into account.