A pricing model for Container-as-a-Service, based on hedonic indices

Container-as-a-service (CaaS) is a business model that facilitates software developers in organizing, running, managing, and deploying applications using container-based virtualization. The CaaS market is a fast-growing one, leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers into offering CaaS solutions built on top of their IaaS platforms. Given the increasing competition among providers, pricing strategies play a key role in determining the business prospects of CaaS. In this work we propose a methodology to analyze the pricing strategies of the providers, based on a hedonic regression. Following that, we also develop a hedonic price index, based on data collected from popular providers, by identifying a wide set of architectural requirements influencing the pricing strategy. We further analyze the correlations between these requirements and define the subset to be included in the regression analysis, interpreting the results in view of the underlying CaaS market characteristics. The model implementation and the data set are freely available on the web under an open-source license.