An approach for economic evaluation of cloud-based applications

This paper links the economic cost of the cloud infrastructure to the business model of an internet-based company in order to evaluate costs and benefits of web applications. To this end, performance models and indexes related to the usage of the main system resources (i.e. processor, memory, storage and network bandwidth) have been reformulated to include new useful metrics for business management, such as customer abandonments and service costs. With the aim of showing practical application of the proposed evaluation study, a typical e-commerce scenario has been considered. Experimental results show that, our approach allows internet-based companies to estimate more accurately the cost of adopting a particular cloud configuration, both in terms of cost of infrastructure and cost of losing customers due to performance degradation. Consequently, it permits to appraise the viability of business decisions, such as promotions and expansion strategies.