Optimising infrastructure as a service provider revenue through customer satisfaction and efficient resource provisioning in cloud computing

With limited resources, it is quite challenging for cloud providers to meet dynamic and massive customers' demands. Higher utilisation or refusing any service level agreement (SLA) may lead to penalties which play a crucial role in the cloud business. Overutilisation of resources, instead of maximizing the revenue, may lead to a decrease in revenue due to the SLA violations. Various studies have been conducted to investigate these issues; however, there is still room for improvement. In this study, the authors proposed a model to address the resource scalability and SLA violation issues by hiring external resources at low prices. However, in contrast to a federated cloud, the proposed model allows a provider to hire resources from any external provider with flexible terms and price. They designed algorithms to optimise providers' revenue by taking into account different parameters, including resource utilization, customer satisfaction, SLA violation, and prices. Simulation result shows that the proposed model is efficient in handling massive demands, and improves revenue generation and customer satisfaction. Offering joint pricing on customers' choice and outsourcing the extra workload to external resources leads to revenue maximization. Hiring external resources earns external revenue as well as it maximizes the total revenue.