Greening the compute cloud's pricing plans

Customers are levied a charge by the cloud service providers for using their services and the attractiveness of the offered pricing plan is one of the key determinants in the cloud adoption. The paper presents a synergistic cloud where the pricing plan, scheduler, and the charge-back model work in tandem with each other to provide green and cost-efficient computing options and incentives to the environmentally-friendly and cost-conscious end-users. The fine-grained, wholesale electricity price aware scheduler works in synergy with end-users' choices to reduce operating energy costs. The fine-grained, resource-utilization based, and spot price aware charge-back model is used to provide incentives in form of reduced usage costs. Strong evaluation results with real-world traces from Google show the feasibility of the proposed techniques.