The cost of electricity contributes significantly to the operating expense
incurred in hosting cloud services. It is necessary to consider this cost
while charging the consumers for their service utilization. In this work, we
arrive at a metering mechanism for cloud services, in which the price of a
cloud service tracks the input cost of electricity. The power-aware cloud
metering developed here is a dynamic pricing and billing model where tariff
for a cloud service is varied in accordance with the input electricity cost.
We arrive at a model for power consumption of virtual machines hosted on the
cloud infrastructure. This power consumption model is used in calculating the
cost of operation of the service. A cloud instance leased by a consumer is
billed based on the cost of operation obtained and its resource utilization.
Experimental results validate the approach presented.