Description
Financial accounting is a very critical process in the monetization process of any service. In the telecommunication world, these processes have long been documented, used, and standardized. Cloud computing being a relatively new paradigm, is still undergoing a transition phase. Many new services are being defined and there is still a huge untapped potential to be exploited.
Rating, Charging, and Billing (RCB) are key activities that allows a service provider to fix monetary values for the resources and services it offers, and allows it to bill the customers consuming the services offered.
Problem Statement
Given a general service scenario, how can the key metrics be identified. The identification of measurable metrics is essential for determining a useful pricing function to be attached to the metric. The challenges we are trying to address under this initiative are multi-dimensional. Is it possible to come up with a general enough RCB model that can address the needs of multiple cloud services – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and many more that would be defined in the future?
Where is the correct boundary between real-time charging strategy, which could be very resource intensive, versus a periodic strategy which has the risk of over-utilization of resources by the consumers between two cycles? Can a viable middle-path strategy be established for cloud based services. Can pre-paid pricing model be adapted for the cloud?
Simplified workflow
Architecture
| Microservice | Repository |
|---|---|
| User Data Records | https://github.com/icclab/cyclops-udr |
| Rating & Charging | https://github.com/icclab/cyclops-rc |
| Billing | https://github.com/icclab/cyclops-billing |
| Dashboard | https://github.com/icclab/cyclops-support |
Developing
- rule engine and pricing strategies
- prediction engine and alarming
- revenue sharing and SLAs
- usage collectors
- scalability
Demos
- vBrownBag Talk, OpenStack Summit, Paris, 2014
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- Swiss Open Cloud Day, Bern, 2014
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- CYCLOPS Demo
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Presentations
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- OpenStack Meetup, Winterthur, 2014
- Presentation (available online): Rating, Charging, Billing – A cloud computing perspective
- CYCLOPS – Rating, Charging & Billing Framework
Articles and Info
- Blog article: CYCLOPS Dashboard: Usage visualization, rate configuration & billing for OpenStack
- Blog article: Dynamic Rating, charging & billing for cloud – a micro service perspective
- Blog article: Rating, charging and billing for the clouds – Cyclops demo
- Blog article: Making money from your cloud services – Part 1
- Blog article: Making money from your cloud services – Part 2
- Reading List (partial list, online): RCB – SoTA (bibliography)
Research publications
- S. Patanjali, B. Truninger, P. Harsh, T. Bohnert, “Cyclops: Rating, Charging & Billing framework for cloud“, The 13th international conference on Telecommunications, Graz, Austria, 2015
- P. Harsh, K. Benz, I. Trajkovska, A. Edmonds, P. Comi, T. Bohnert, “A highly available generic billing architecture for heterogenous mobile cloud services”, The 2014 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing, Las Vegas, USA.
- P. Harsh, A Highly Available Generic Billing Architecture for Heterogeneous Mobile Cloud Services (slides), 2014 World Congress in Computer Science, July 2014, Las Vegas, USA
Technology transfer
Research Approach
Following the ICCLab research approach
Contact
- icclab-rcb-cyclops[at]dornbirn[dot]zhaw[dot]ch
Team