The economics of the cloud: price competition and congestion

Abstract : This letter provides an overview of our recent work studying the impacts of price competition and congestion in the cloud marketplace. Specifically, we discuss a three-tier market model that studies a vertical marketplace where users purchase services from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, which in turn purchase computing resources from either Provider-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers.