Comparison of Two Yield Management Strategies for Cloud Service Providers

Several Cloud computing business models have been developed and implemented, including dynamic pricing schemes. This paper extends the known concepts of revenue management to the specific case of Cloud computing from two perspectives. First, we propose system architecture for Cloud service providers for combining demand-based pricing and scheduling. Second, a comparison of two yield management methods for cloud computing has been compared: Limited Discount Period Algorithm and VM Reservation Level Algorithm. By taking advantage of demand estimation, the two algorithms find the optimum number of VMs that are sold at full price and the optimum time period before the allocation when the prices should change. Simulation results show that both yield management methods outperform static pricing models and the algorithms perform differently considering the deviation of demand.