Cloud Computing Pricing Models: A Survey

Afaf Edinat

Abstract: loud computing is emerging as a promising field offering a variety of computing services to end users. These services such as infrastructures, platforms and applications could be accessed on-demand whenever it is needed. In Cloud Computing, different types of resources would be required to provide services, but the demands such as requests rates and user's requirements of these services and the cost of the required resources are continuously varying. Therefore These services are offered at different prices using various pricing schemes and techniques. Customers will favor the service provider offering the best QoS with the lowest price. Therefore, applying a fair pricing model will attract more customers and achieve higher revenues for service providers.This paper provides a survey on cloud pricing models and analyzes the recent and relevant research in this field, and comparing many employed and proposed pricing models techniques and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each. The comparison is based on many aspects such as fairness, pricing approach, mechanisms, and implementation.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Cloud Pricing