POSTER: Profit-Aware Cloud Resource Provisioner for Ecommerce

In recent years, the Cloud Computing paradigm has proven effective in scaling dynamically the number of servers according to simple performance metrics and the incoming workload. However while some applications are able to scale-out, as current scaling metrics do not relate system performance to sales, hosting costs and profits are not optimized completely. The following article proposes a novel technique for dynamic resource provisioning based on revenue and cost metrics, to optimize profits for online retailers in the Cloud. The proposal relies on user behavior models that relate Quality-of-Service (QoS) to service capacity, and to the intention of users to buy a product on an Ecommerce site. We show how such metrics can enable profit-aware resource management by setting an optimal number of servers at each time of the day. Experiments are performed on custom, real-life datasets from an Ecommerce retailer contain over two years of access, performance, and sales data from popular travelWeb applications.