Verifiable resource accounting for cloud computing services

Cloud computing offers users the potential to reduce operating and capital expenses by leveraging the amortization benefits offered by large, managed infrastructures. However, the black-box and dynamic nature of the cloud infrastructure makes it difficult for them to reason about the expenses that their applications incur. At the same time, the profitability of cloud providers depends on their ability to multiplex several customer applications to maintain high utilization levels. However, this multiplexing may cause providers to incorrectly attribute resource consumption to customers or implicitly bear additional costs thereby reducing their cost-effectiveness. Our position in this paper is that for cloud computing as a paradigm to be sustainable in the long term, we need a systematic approach for verifiable resource accounting. Verifiability here means that cloud customers can be assured that (a) their applications indeed physically consumed the resources they were charged for and (b) that this consumption was justified based on an agreed policy. As a first step toward this vision, in this paper we articulate the challenges and opportunities for realizing such a framework.