Exploring Spot Market Users' Willingness-to-Pay for Service-Level Agreements in Cloud Computing

• Main Authors: SHANG, R., HUANG, J., YANG, Y. P., KAUFFMAN, Robert J.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Computer Sciences; Management Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1758
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Since it was launched in December 2009, Amazon.com's spot market for IT services has become an alternative to its fixed-priced, on-demand IT services market for users who wish to leverage their budgets and specify their service-level preferences. Due to the price volatility of the spot market for cloud computing services though, potential users are subject to the risk of service interruptions. At the same time, cloud management brokers, who act as middlemen and aggregators for cloud computing service resources, have been able to replace spot resources with service-level agreement (SLA)-based services at a lower cost. In this research, we investigate the key variables that affect spot market users’ willingness-to-pay for SLA-based cloud computing services. Leveraging our empirical analysis of historical spot market prices for cloud computing service risk, we propose a model that includes key market and user variables that impact a user’s willingness-to-pay for SLA-based cloud computing services. This research-in-progress paper presents the design of an experiment that can empirically investigate these issues.