Pricing Intelligence as a Service for Cloud Computing

Pricing Intelligence as a service (PINaaS) can be seen as the brokerage of user requirements to pricing of available resources in a cloud computing environment. Users of both public and private clouds have to consider the price of services they consume. Current cloud pricing approaches require the service consumer to calculate their own prices by interpreting high level requirements. This paper will examine issues seen in cloud service pricing and propose an ontological problem-solving approach which manages cloud pricing automatically at semantic level as "pricing intelligence". A case study of Amazon EC2 pricing has been carried out to provide a practical demonstration and validation of the approach.