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A Case for Consumer–centric Resource Accounting Models

Lookup NU author(s): Ahmed Mihoob, Dr Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Emeritus Professor Santosh Shrivastava

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Abstract

A pay--per--use cloud service should be made available to consumers with an unambiguous resource accounting model that precisely describes all the factors that are taken into account in calculating resource consumption charges. The paper proposes the notion of consumer--centric resource accounting model such that consumers can programmatically compute their consumption charges of a remotely used service. In particular, the notion of strongly consumer--centric accounting model is proposed that requires that all the data needed for calculating billing charges can be collected independently by the consumer (or a trusted third party, TTP); in effect, this means that a consumer (or a TTP) should be in a position to run their own measurement service. Strongly consumer--centric accounting models have the desirable property of openness and transparency, since service users are in a position to verify the charges billed to them. To illustrate the ideas, the accounting model of a given cloud infrastructure service (simple storage service, S3 from Amazon) is evaluated. The exercise reveals some shortcomings which can be fixed fairly easily by Amazon to make their model strongly consumer--centric. Service providers can learn from this evaluation study to re-examine their accounting models and perform any amendments.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Mihoob A, Molina-Jimenez C, Shrivastava SK

Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)

Publication status: Published

Conference Name: 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing

Year of Conference: 2010

Pages: 506-512

Date deposited: 07/09/2010

Publisher: IEEE Computer Society

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CLOUD.2010.44

DOI: 10.1109/CLOUD.2010.44

Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item

ISBN: 9781424482078


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