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by nostrademons
4867 days ago
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In theory, the service provider could just switch to a better scheduler and raise their rates to compensate, since the TCO for a customer would go down correspondingly. Their costs go down, their profits go up, and customers still benefit. Prices are usually determined more by competition than by technical factors. Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of lock-in to PaaS vendors, which is the real reason I'd be skeptical about building a business on them. The nice thing about the VM layer is there's a well-documented, public API between your code and the platform, so when your service provider raises their rates, you can switch to another one or operate your own hardware. |
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You could price per request that you serve for your customers. Of course that just puts the perverse incentive on your customers, since now the service provider is bearing the cost of a nonoptimized application. The client doesn't care much about the weight of a single request, since the cost to him is the same (well except for latency).
So what you could do is define a 'typical request' by running a suite of open source web application on the service provider. This way you see how much hardware is required for a given throughput of 'typical requests'. Put a price tag on that. Now pricing also becomes much clearer for the customers: they know that if their application's requests are roughly of the same weight as open source web application X, Y and Z, and if they serve N requests per month, then their cost will be roughly N*(price of 1 typical request) per month.
Now the service provider has the incentive to optimize its hardware and services, because then it can run more typical requests at the same cost. The client has the incentive to optimize his application, because then he will use fewer typical request units, and hence pay less.
You could also determine the cost of a typical request by averaging over all of your clients' applications, instead of a suite of open source applications.