Pay as You Go in the Cloud: One Watt at a Time

Advancements in virtualization have led to the construction of large data centers that host thousands of servers and to the selling of virtual machines (VMs) to consumers under a per-hour rate. This current pricing scheme employed by cloud computing providers ignores the disparities in consumer usage and in its related infrastructural costs of providing the service to different users. We thus propose a new pricing model based on the liable power consumption of the VM, which we correlate to the VM’s proportion of CPU and disk I/O usage. We evaluate the fairness and practicality of our accountable power consumption model on various machines and storage types. We then demonstrate the benefits of the proposed pricing model by looking at four consumer cases. Our work is undergoing further experimentation and we hope to expand our testing using cloud services.