Capacity allocation and pricing policies for cloud computing service providers

Abstract

The cloud computing is regarded as a paradigm shift in today’s IT world. As cloud computing resources behave like perishable products, revenue management techniques can be applied to increase cloud service provider's total revenue. In this paper, we propose various methods for pricing and capacity allocation. We consider three types of instances offered by the service provider; subscription, on-demand and spot instances. We introduce three allocation and pricing policies and propose different models. We simulate these models on a randomly generated dataset and evaluate the models for different capacities. The results we obtain indicate the sensitivity of revenue to varying policies and demonstrate the potential profit increase for cloud service providers. © 2018, Curran Associates Inc. All rights reserved.