Distributed systems meet economics: pricing in the cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing allows users to perform computation in a public cloud with a pricing scheme typically based on incurred resource consumption. While cloud comput-ing is often considered as merely a new application for classic distributed systems, we argue that, by decoupling users from cloud providers with a pricing scheme as the bridge, cloud computing has fundamentally changed the landscape of system design and optimization. Our pre-liminary studies on Amazon EC2 cloud service and on a local cloud computing testbed, have revealed an interest-ing interplay between distributed systems and economics related to pricing. We believe that this new angle of look-ing at distributed systems potentially fosters new insights into cloud computing. 1