Profit Maximization in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a novel paradigm for the provision of computing infrastructure, which aims to shift the location of the computing infrastructure to the network in order to reduce the costs of management and maintenance of hardware and software resources. To maximize the profit, a service provider should understand both service charges and business costs. Our pricing model takes such factors into considerations as the amount of a service, the workload of an application environment, the configuration of a multi-server system, the service-level agreement, the satisfaction of a consumer, the quality of a service, the penalty of a low-quality service, the cost of renting, the cost of energy consumption, and a service provider’s margin and profit. Our approach is to treat a multi-server system as an M/M/m queuing model, such that our optimization problem can be formulated and solved analytically. We evaluate its performance using an analytical model and solve it to obtain important performance factors like mean number of tasks in the system.