A Survey of Cloud Computing Variable Pricing Models

Abstract

Cloud computing has grasped the attention of scientific community and business industry towards the provisioning of computing resources as utility and software as a service over a network. Profitability and revenue maximization are the most important goals for any cloud service provider which can be employed through different pricing models. Historically, cloud providers were following the fixed pricing strategies while provisioning their services to the clients. However, these approaches have their own shortcomings resulting in resource wastage, lack of fairness and user satisfaction. With expansion of cloud users in market every day, provisioning of fair resource allocation with service differentiation and efficient pricing model is demand seeking, resulting in a shift from static to dynamic pricing models. In this paper, we discuss and investigate different pricing scheme with respect to their advantages, limitations and possible future directions. The study will open a way for vendors to seek new research directions in dynamic pricing schemes.