Cloud storage providers need more explicit billing metrics

Summary: Cloud storage providers should act, disk usage, rather than I/O, the researchers argued at the USENIX meeting that cloud storage service communicators could be their customers or their own, through a measure of inaccurate billing.

"Disk Time is cost, not I/O or bytes, which is exactly what should be in the cloud storage System," Matthewwachs, a researcher at the University of Carnegiemellon, said in a talk this week at the Usenixhotcloud seminar. ”

"Disk Time is cost, not I/O or bytes, and this is exactly what should be in the cloud storage system," said Matthew Wachs, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in a conversation at the Usenixhotcloud seminar this week in Oregon State Portland.

"Cloud storage access billing should be calculated for wear and charges that are actually caused by their I/O activity, rather than the cost of those incorrect proxy fees (for example, bytes or I/O)," the newspaper said.

Today's IaaS (infrastructure as a service) cloud, such as Amazon or Google storage providers, usually acts on two factors, the amount of data stored and the amount of data transferred to and from the cloud, or I/O.

Although the charge is based on the amount of data stored is a reasonable metric, Wachs argues that for I/O is a defective charge amount, given the data that is spent reading data from the disk or writing to the working disk. The cost of processing these bits on disk may vary greatly from one instance to another, Wachs points out.

"Therefore, there is little likelihood that the storage access tenant bill will bear the actual cost of the relationship," the newspaper said.

Wachs mentioned factors that can lead to this change, the most prominent is the difference between the random and sequential access disk.

In continuous access, data is written or read from one part of the disk in a constant stream of bits. At random access, the head must jump to different parts of the disk to read or write data.

The difference between the two types of workloads can be huge, Wachs said.

For example, you can achieve continuous access to disks averaging up to 63.5mb/s (megabits per second) throughput, while random access can only be performed in 1.5mb/s

In practical applications, this difference means that a client performs a random amount of read and write that utilizes the system's resources far more than other customers who can access the same amount of data through successive visits, even if two customers charge the same amount.

In the long run, this approach will provide customers with any incentive to build more effective data transmission methods, and in financial penalties for those customers who are in place in this practice. It also weakens storage providers, who may not have these inefficiencies in the original planned profit space.

Other factors may exacerbate this gap between further workloads, Wachs said. For example, disk caching eliminates the need to access disks. Where the cache is used, the customer may actually be subject to serious arbitrary charges. In addition, too many metadata lookups to locate the appropriate data may consume too much resources.

"This is an unsustainable approach because the client or provider will be unhappy," Wachs said. "With easy to request clients will pay too much difficulty and ask customers will pay too little." "Wachs presents an alternative billing mechanism, a disk-based time, or amount of time that actually requires the disk to read or write data."

"When we charge disk Time and select a disk time to match the supplier cost rate, the cost is also being restored fairly," Wachs said.

The participants raised various issues with this approach. It points out that customers may be willing to pay a little more to get a more comprehensive forecast and easy to understand Bill, as an example of how mobile phones in a simple uniform, rather than how many actual cell charges per minute of the base industry mobile phone antenna tower used by each customer.

Wachs retorted that the cloud services between the operating costs and which gaps are being charged can significantly differ, not just a subtle average cost.

Mobile users may "not suffer from insomnia if they pay 30 yuan a month for 40 yuan a month instead," he said. The enterprise's pay, on the other hand 40000000 dollars a month 30 million dollars, while one months, may have to "accounting and pricing is a closer to the actual cost," he said.

Andrewoffield, for the economic orbital meeting of the President of the Wachs "speak is, in part, this report is a bigger challenge, and is being done by cloud providers, that is, in the study of deeper, more complex tasks, in the face of current operational practices in order to provide simpler and cheaper services to their customers.

Existing cloud-storage metrics "are appealing to customer-facing positions in the right way to market the entire system," Wachs said. "But you need to have something that will actually match the cost of the supplier," he said.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)