Dynamic Pricing Decision of Cloud Service Oriented to Elastic Scaling

Abstract

Can elastic scaling service and dynamic pricing bring more profits to cloud service providers? If so, under what circumstances can the benefits be maximized? In this article, a decision support model based on Markov process is proposed for pricing of cloud service oriented to elastic scaling. This service is only provided to Long-term contract customers with different time sensitivities, which will be used to divide the market into four categories: no time sensitivity, low time sensitivity, high time sensitivity, and scattered time sensitivity. The purpose of this article is to show whether elastic scaling service is necessary for cloud service providers. Through the experimental simulation, it can be found that the elastic scaling service can bring more profits to the supplier when the customer's time sensitivity is high or scattered. Dynamic pricing strategy is particularly important when facing the scattered time sensitivity of customers.