An economic model for green cloud

Abstract

A novel economic model for cloud-based services is presented that: (i) transparently presents energy demands (of services) to the customers in a simple abstract form, called green point, which is understandable to any general user; (ii) provides economic incentives (through dynamic discounts) as motivations for customers to select greener configuration; and (iii) offers service prices to customers such that the profit of cloud vendor is maximized while providing the discounts. Price is differentiated for different classes of customers (e.g. gold, silver, and bronze) and dynamic based on posterior distribution on resource demand considering both current demand and willingness toward green configuration. The model enables a paradigm shift in cloud service offering that provides higher transparency and control knobs to users for greener configuration. Preliminary results indicate higher profit using the proposed model compared to static pricing in existing pay-per-use service offerings.