Abstract: A method to facilitate data sharing for cloud applications includes determining one or more cost levers for a cloud service provider to share data among applications; determining a costing function that considers a resource cost of creating and maintaining the sharing, potential penalties to be paid if a service level agreement (SLA) is breached by the cloud service provider, and overprovisioning of services from the provider; and interactively answering what-if questions on pricing of services to allow a consumer to explore the cost of data sharing from the provider.

Abstract: A method for database consolidation includes generating a model for expected penalty estimation; determining a tenant's value as a function of query arrival rate and SLA penalty; placing a tenant to minimize a total expected cost in the order of the tenant value; and progressively using additional servers to prevent any server from being saturated to guarantee a tenant placement that costs no more than four times the cost of any other placement