An Economic Model for Scaling Cloud Applications

Web technologies along with the virtualization of computation and storage resources have allowed extensive flexibility in the development, deployment and delivery of software solutions. On one hand, this flexibility has allowed engineers to commission and repurpose resources on demand and at will. On the other hand, the flexibility has given rise to new business models and interesting implications in the economics of software ecosystems. In this work, we propose a model to capture the technical and economic transactions within a web software ecosystem deployed on a dynamic cloud environment. Next, we demonstrate the use of such model to define rules for a more economically efficient adaptation strategy for web applications as their incoming traffic fluctuates.