Cloud pricing scheme in line with performance levels, as opposed to units of time, will be interesting play against rivals along with Amazon Web Services.

Two Microsoft employees have applied for a patent on a cloud pricing scheme in response to the customers’ ability to set the performance levels of a cloud service. Customers will be guaranteed the designated level of performance, in keeping with the quoted price.

The patent application illustrates how guaranteed performance levels may play a bigger role in future use of cloud services than they do currently. a typical criticism of on-demand pricing, together with that utilized by Amazon Web Services, is that it provides an hour of service time with none guarantee of the way well the system will run. Specific things including I/O levels is also set with a number of Amazon’s larger servers, together with a fee for that guaranteed performance.

Performance metrics could be difficult to discern for the cloud user and frequently go unreported voluntarily by the service providers. Netflix famously discovered the “noisy neighbor” problem inside Amazon, when its virtual server was loaded onto an already busy host and its neighbors sapped tiny fractions of a second from its expected I/O rate. Netflix found performance vagary unacceptable and solved the difficulty by ordering servers on hosts that it dominated. That way, if there has been a resource hog locally, it’d be Netflix. Not every cloud user has that option.

The proven fact that the performance issue can be among the few how one can pry open the door to Amazon Web Services’ growing customer empire seems also to have occurred to Google, which emphasized its ability to provide “consistent performance” because it announced the final availability of Google Cloud Platform in December, besides an Amazon-like price cut.

The Microsoft pricing approach allows customers to either bid a worth they’re willing to pay or to be quoted a value according to the system’s estimate of the resources had to deliver that performance. The Microsoft employees filed for international patent protection on June 20, with a press release of the appliance Dec. 27 by the sector Intellectual Property Organization.

[Like to learn more about Amazon’s high performance instance types? See Amazon Adds PostgreSQL, Big C3 Servers]

The names at the patent were those of Navendu Jain and Ishai Menache. Jain is a Microsoft researcher within the Seattle area. He studied on the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 2008 with a Ph.D. in computer science and joining Microsoft in July of that year, in keeping with his profile on Linkedin. He did his undergraduate and master’s work on the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

Ishai Menache joined the intense Computing Group at Microsoft in Redmond in 2011. A graduate of the Technion-Machon Technologi Le’Israel, he previously worked as a hardware engineer at Intel for 3 years.

The pair teamed as much as produce an method to pricing that looks to make performance, in addition to time used, a key component of the pricing model. “For batch application-type jobs, performance parameters include a piece volume parameter and a deadline,” the WIPO description reads. “For an interactive-type application job, example performance-related parameters may include a mean load parameter, a peak load parameter, an acceptance rate parameter, a minimum capacity parameter, a maximum capacity parameter, and/or a time window parameter over which load is specified.”

As customers enter such parameters into the pricing system, they can bid on what they’re willing to pay for any such job, with the system deciding whether it has the resources to simply accept it on the bid price. Or the system can simply return a quote at which it is going to do the job in a given period of time. Microsoft has not made any announcement that it’s about to adopt one of these pricing scheme. But its Azure cloud service is already geared to charge by the minute, not the hour. The smaller time increments might make it simpler to implement performance-based pricing than a system that’s ruled by-the-hour pricing.

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.

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