  A fundamental goal in the design of IaaS service is to enable both
user-friendly and cost-effective service access, while attaining high resource
efficiency for revenue maximization. QoS differentiation is an important lens
to achieve this design goal. In this paper, we propose the first analytical
QoS-differentiated resource management and pricing architecture in the cloud
computing context; here, a cloud service provider (CSP) offers a portfolio of
SLAs. In order to maximize the CSP's revenue, we address two technical
questions: (1) how to set the SLA prices so as to direct users to the SLAs best
fitting their needs, and, (2) determining how many servers should be assigned
to each SLA, and which users and how many of their jobs are admitted to be
served. We propose optimal schemes to jointly determine SLA-based prices and
perform capacity planning in polynomial time. Our pricing model retains high
usability at the customer's end. Compared with standard usage-based pricing
schemes, numerical results show that the proposed scheme can improve the
revenue by up to a five-fold increase.
