Abstract. The paper investigates the possibility of consumer side resource accounting of cloud services, meaning, whether it is possible for a consumer to independently collect all the resource usage data required for calculating billing charges for pay-per-use cloud services. The accounting models of two widely used cloud services are examined and possible sources of difficulties are identified, including causes that could lead to discrepancies between the metering data collected by the consumer and the provider. The investigation is motivated by the fact that cloud service providers perform their own measurements to collect usage data, but as yet there are no equivalent facilities of consumer-trusted metering that are commonly provided by utility service providers like gas and electricity. The paper goes on to suggest how cloud service providers can improve their accounting models to facilitate the task of consumer side resource accounting.
Pay only for what you use" principle underpins the charging policies of widely used cloud services that are on offer. Ideally for these services, consumers should be in a position to verify the charges billed to them. However, unlike traditional utility services such as gas and electricity, no consumer-trusted metering services are available for cloud services, so consumers have no choice but to rely on the usage data made available by the providers. In light of this, the paper proposes the notion of Consumer-centric Resource Accounting Models for cloud resources. An accounting model is strongly consumer-centric if all the data that the model requires 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. With this view in mind, the accounting models of some widely used cloud services are examined and possible sources of difficulties in data collection are identified, including causes that could lead to discrepancies between the metering data collected by the consumer and the provider. The paper goes on to suggest how cloud service providers can improve their accounting models to make them consumer-centric.
In bilateral accounting of resource consumption both the consumer and provider independently measure the amount of resources consumed by the consumer. The problem here is that potential disparities between the provider's and consumer's accountings, might lead to conflicts between the two parties that need to be resolved. We argue that with the proper mechanisms available, most of these conflicts can be solved online, as opposite to in court resolution; the design of such mechanisms is still a research topic; to help cover the gap, in this paper we propose a peer-to-peer protocol for online dispute resolution over storage consumption. The protocol is peer-to-peer and takes into consideration the possible causes (e.g., transmission delays, unsynchronized metric collectors, etc.) of the disparity between the provider's and consumer's accountings to make, if possible, the two results converge
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