Costs of Using Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Towards a General Framework

Abstract

Cloud computing infrastructure is a state-of-the-art computing as a utility paradigm, offering individuals and organizations instantly-available and scalable computing capacity. Organizations may deploy the cloud infrastructure in own data centers, as a private cloud, or use the public on-demand cloud infrastructure charged on a pay-per-use basis. The organizations may also adopt a hybrid solution, i.e. use public cloud capacity to complement the resources in the private cloud, e.g. during the periods of rapid growth in the demand. One of the important factors that affect the organizations’ decisions to adopt a hybrid cloud is the total cost of acquiring and managing the infrastructure. In this paper, a general framework for cloud infrastructure cost assessment is introduced, wherein for several types of cloud infrastructure resources, the associated cost components and the factors determining these components are considered.