Smart metering of cloud services

Smart metering, prevalent in the power grids, is a billing model in which consumers are charged variable rates for a service consumed based on the load conditions of the system providing the service. In this paper we present a similar billing model for cloud services. We develop a model where the tariff is varied based on the load prevailing on the cloud infrastructure. We obtain a mapping between the load condition for a particular time period and the pricing. The pricing for every time period is published and it is the consumer´s discretion to continue using the service or to suspend usage. Based on historical data, the load on the cloud infrastructure is predicted using the auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) statistical model. Monitoring the cloud infrastructure is an essential component of any form of cloud metering and we rely on tools available off-the-shelf for the purpose. The pricing information obtained is used for billing the consumers. The bill amount is a function of pricing for a time interval and the corresponding utilization of compute resource. The calculated bill is produced to the consumer.