Guest Talk on The Economics of Cloud Computing

The Economics of Cloud Computing, 
by Dr. Liang Zheng, Princeton University, Electrical Engineering Dept.
August 15, 2016 @Exactum C 222 
Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Abstract: As a form of could computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides shared computingresources over the Internet, and has revolutionized the way that computing resources are utilized: they are virtualized in units of instances associated with remote virtual machines with specified amounts of CPU, memory, storage, and other attributes. Users can then lease these cloud computing capacities and pay for the execution of their jobs only as they are using the resources, eliminating setup and maintenance costs for the physical machines. With the growth of cloud services, cloud providers face highly dynamic user demands for their resources, making it difficult for them to maintain consistent quality-of-service (QoS).

We propose to use price incentives to stabilize user demands. Although cloud resources are often charged simply by usage-based pricing, it cannot handle in real-time the available capacity within datacenter networks and individual jobs' required instance hours and interruptibility. Thus, many cloud providers are turning to different pricing schemes to match their prices to real-time user demands. For example, auction-based pricing allows users to bid for spare cloud resources at a highly reduced rate, and volume-discount pricing encourages users' long-term usage by charging longer jobs a lower unit price. We provide insights into these pricing schemes by quantifying user demands with different prices, and derive optimal strategies to benefit both cloud providers and users.

Bio: Liang Zheng is a postdoc in Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the City University of Hong Kong in 2015. Her research interests are in user behavior analytics, network economics, cloud computing, communication networks, nonlinear optimization and its applications. She was a finalist of the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship in 2013. She was a recipient of the CityU Outstanding Academic Performance Award and first-class Student Research Excellence Award.