Pricing Models in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is one of the most promising computing models evolving from last decade in distributed computing. It has the capability of using services to allow the small Information Technology companies to rise in the market. With the growing use of cloud services number of companies has started entering in cloud market which includes cloud infrastructure providers. It has lead to the standardization of Application Programming Interfaces (API) and infrastructure. Optimal pricing of the services has become a major challenge for the cloud service providers. Various pricing models have evolved over the period. Some of these are the extended variants of Grid models whereas others completely new proposals. In this paper, various cloud service pricing issues along with recent models proposed in the literature have been reviewed. These models are classified into pay per use, subscription based and hybrid categories.