In the past few months, the ICCLab has been developing a generic rating-charging-billing engine that would offer cloud service providers a modular framework that enables dynamic pricing activities and distributed design. The model closely follows the general accounting process, in the same time providing a lot of flexibility due to the loosely-coupled design. The platform is currently being developed in Python on top of OpenStack using its Ceilometer component for collection and extraction of the metered data. To enable this facility, we have created a custom Ceilometer client that uses REST APIs to get the needed data records. The key architectural components are:
- Mediation module: The data coming from the monitoring devices needs to be combined in a single user session and transformed in a common format.
- Charging module: The rating engine collects the usage records and applies the appropriate pricing strategy.
- Billing module: The basic billed amount in a billing cycle is generated by aggregating the charge records and readjusts it by applying discounts, penalties, taxation etc.
- User/Management interface: The service can be accessed by a web-based user-interface that allows configuration of every aspect of the RCB process.
In the video below, a demo of the first Cyclops prototype is being shown. In the scenario, we take a look at the basic admin features: listing all the tenants and their respective users, checking the user status, calculating the accumulated cost per user, as well as starting a periodic counter for the specific user. The facility for defining the pricing function for a particular user, allows the admin to choose some of the available meters and apply standard arithmetics to get the desired formula.
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This is the first prototype for our RCB solution. In future, the platform would offer more advanced rating and charging models with the support for discounts, taxation, penalties etc, as well as support for other cloud platforms.