Pricing as a Service: Personalized Pricing Strategy in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is emerging as a model in support of "everything-as-a-service". Virtualized physical resources, virtualized infrastructure, as well as virtualized middleware platforms and business applications are being provided and consumed as services in the Cloud. In practice, cloud service providers tend to offer services that can be grouped into three categories: software as a service (Saas), platform as a service (Paas) and infrastructure as a service (Iaas). To maximize the revenue of providers and meet the demands of users, we proposed a personalized pricing strategy for cloud computing, which is defined as pricing as a service (Praas). Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed pricing strategy allows on-demand uses of cloud resources and provides more revenue for cloud providers.