A Blockchain-Powered Federated Cloud Environment for Transparent Pricing and Provider Governance

Federated cloud environments offer compelling advantages over traditional models, including reduced operational costs, lower energy consumption, enhanced resource pooling, and a positive impact on carbon emissions. However, existing implementations often suffer from significant limitations, such as diminished provider brand equity, forced algorithm-driven provider selection that may neglect user preferences, suppressed competition, and a lack of transparent mechanisms for profit distribution, pricing, and error disclosure. This research addresses these challenges by proposing a novel federated cloud environment model powered by blockchain technology and smart contracts. The proposed framework ensures customer autonomy in provider selection, enables evaluation of cloud service providers, and introduces a real-time pricing mechanism that can promote transparency in cloud providers’ costs and profits within the federated environment. This real-time mechanism is a key innovation of our model. It implements a previously unexplored dynamic VM pricing strategy that further enhances transparency and operational efficiency. Simulation results, calibrated using real-world configurations from Germany and the United Kingdom, show that our proposed model captured more than 50% of total VM deployment in both cases. This outcome is strongly influenced by customer behavior, where users naturally tend to select the lowest-priced service—making our economically-aware pricing mechanism highly competitive. Furthermore, the model enabled noticeable revenue advantages for providers, including a 31.57% increase in Germany and an 18.75% increase in the UK. These results indicate that cloud providers seeking higher profitability would benefit from applying the proposed pricing strategy, which in turn promotes greater transparency in how resources are evaluated and offered within a federated environment.