Cost and Billing Practices in Cloud

Abstract

The usage of Cloud is through a service provider, wherein the two primary stakeholders are the consumers and provider of the service. However, unlike utilities such as electricity, water, postal, or city services, the Cloud Computing services offer opportunities for many interesting and innovative provisions, which we shall discuss later in this chapter. In this section, we compare and contrast some facets of billing in traditional utility services vs. Cloud Computing.

The entire Cloud Computing usage model is based on a pay as you go or pay for what users’ consume. This enables Cloud customers to not buy IT hardware or software products, but rent them on need basis, e.g., how many CPU cores are needed and for how long, with memory and persistence storage space, etc. The persistence storage also comes in various forms, such as disks directly attached to the compute instance for faster access, but at a higher cost, or stored across the network in a long-term storage repository at a cheaper cost and higher latency, etc. Using our proposed framework, a user can understand needs, pick a Cloud service provider, and wisely choose additional services or capabilities to do auto scaling and load balancing and plan for future growth.