Cloud Computing Pricing Models: A Survey

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising field offering a variety of computing services to end users. These services are offered at different prices using various pricing schemes and techniques. End users will favor the service provider offering the best QoS with the lowest price. Therefore, applying a fair pricing model will attract more customers and achieve higher revenues for service providers. This work focuses on comparing many employed and proposed pricing models techniques and highlights the pros and cons of each. The comparison is based on many aspects such as fairness, pricing approach, and utilization period. Such an approach provides a solid ground for designing better models in the future. We have found that most approaches are theoretical and not implemented in the real market, although their simulation results are very promising. Moreover, most of these approaches are biased toward the service provider.