Automatic Generation of Purchasing Plans for Cloud Services

Abstract

The myriad of cloud service providers, as well as their overwhelming variety of configuration and purchasing options, result in a highly complex purchasing scenario. Furthermore, users may specify their needs for cloud services provisioning with a certain scheduling restrictions. There is a need for an automatic support for obtaining an appropriate purchasing plan, which takes into account both service configurations and scheduling needs, while allowing the comparison among different providers and their various offerings. In this work, we present an automatic purchasing plan generator, which analyzes cloud service offerings from several providers to obtain an optimized purchasing plan according to user needs. From the obtained purchasing plan, our solution can provide the corresponding charge plan, possibly including discounts, which serves the purpose of comparing offerings to get the best option.