Cloud Pricing Models: A Survey and Position Paper

In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as a successful mode of delivery for Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings and more generically anything as a service (XaaS) offerings. Cloud computing is, an evolutionary paradigm shift in the ways computing platforms and services are made available to the consumers, and this has been made possible due to numerous technology enablers, along with changing business strategies. These changes have contributed significantly in achieving the market shift from differentiated to undifferentiated price models, thereby helping the market movements from monopolistic to perfect competition, and resulting in converting traditional enterprise class software tools and hardware platforms into a commodity. This paper, is a survey on pricing strategies and schemes employed in cloud offerings wherein we study various mechanisms currently being used. The literature survey encompasses market trends on cloud pricing with specific focus on emerging market scenario of India. Based on the need of providing flexible pricing, we discuss our position on a revenue framework wherein cloud pricing strategy is a function of periodic resource utilization analysis, and provide details of our revenue generation model that depends on cross over of different pricing schemes.