Pricing Over Differentiated Hybrid Cloud Computing Services
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Hong, Kuo-Tung
Abstract
We propose pricing mechanisms for cloud computing systems based on contract theory and game theory. Differentiated pricing mechanism is for the intermediate period in which private data center is still popular. A service provider needs to deal with customers with and without private data center. Those customers without private data center tend to buy more cloud computing resources while customers with private data center use cloud computing only when it is cheap, due to the concept of decreasing marginal value in Economics. As a result, a service provider needs to know if customers have private data center for the purpose of price discrimination. In differentiated pricing mechanism, a service provider provides a menu for customers to order virtual machines, which is similar to the mechanism in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. We aim to design a menu that can maximize service provider’s profit. To achieve this goal, we use principal-agent model to induce customers'' hidden information, which is endowment computing power (i.e. size of private computing cloud). Our result shows that our differentiated pricing mechanism is able to maximize service provider’s profit and keep customer’s utility at their acceptable level. Differentiated pricing mechanism also shows that customers without her own private computing cloud will be exploited to get a lower utility gain than those with her own private computing cloud. Numerical results are also provided. General pricing mechanism is a general mechanism which can be applied to a system containing on-demand instances and spot instances like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. In the system, the service provider sells on-demand instances first. Then the service provider sells the remaining resources for spot instances. Our mechanism determines at which price on-demand instances should be sold and how many remaining resources should be sold for spot instances in order to maximize service provider’s revenue. Empirical data from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is also provided.
Subjects
cloud computing
game theory
contract theory
pricing
auction
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-100-R97942140-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):e9ea3bd69a3693c83bbfc7767626c676