Cost exploration of data sharings in the cloud

Enabling data sharing among mobile apps hosted in the same cloud infrastructure can provide a competitive advantage to the mobile apps by giving them access to rich information as well as increasing the revenue for the cloud provider. We introduce a costing tool that allows application owners (i.e., consumers) and the cloud service provider to assess the cost of a desired data sharing. The costing tool enables the consumers to effectively explore the cost space by choosing between alternative configurations of varying data qualities, specified by the staleness and the accuracy of the data sharing. In other words, staleness and accuracy requirements on the data sharing are used as levers for controlling costs. These capabilities are implemented in a What-if analysis tool, which has been integrated with a large data-sharing platform. We conducted extensive experiments on the integrated platform with a sharing ecosystem created around Twitter data and show the effectiveness of the results produced by the What-if tool.