A Survey of Profit Optimization Techniques for Cloud Providers

As the demand for computing resources grows, cloud computing becomes more and more popular as a pay-as-you-go model, in which the computing resources and services are provided to cloud users efficiently. For cloud providers, the typical goal is to maximize their profits. However, maximizing profits in a highly competitive cloud market is a huge challenge for cloud providers. In this article, a survey of profit optimization techniques is proposed to increase cloud provider profitability through service quality improvement, service pricing, energy consumption reduction, and virtual network function (VNF) deployment. The strategy of improving user service quality is discussed first, followed by the pricing strategy for cloud resources to maximize revenue. Then, this article summarizes the techniques for cloud data centers to reduce server power consumption. Finally, various heuristic algorithms for VNF deployment in the cloud are further described to reduce the cost of cloud providers while maintaining performance. We classify research works based on components of profit and methods used to demonstrate similarities and differences in these studies. We hope this survey will provide researchers with insights into cloud profit optimization techniques.