Understanding Cloud Characteristics - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 9

Chargeback helps cloud tenants in some of the following ways:

Determining precise usage to plan for growth and provision new resource.

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Knowing your product's overall resource footprint, which may help you become
greener

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Optimizing resource usage based on real usage data sourced from the cloud provider

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Budgeting cloud infrastructure

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Implementing Chargeback
The backend implementation of the chargeback model would need to have at least the
following characteristics:
Scalable The resource consumption monitoring component, which keeps tabs on the
whole data center or across data centers of the cloud provider, would need to be scalable
at the cloud scale with tens of billions of resource usage transactions happening every day.
The metering component itself would be a huge big data problem to solve.
Atomic Precision Cloud vendors charge for every hour of compute resources tenants utilize.
Big public cloud vendors may have hundreds of thousands of servers and millions of tenants
on their platform. Implementing precision into the resource monitoring component is crucial
because when added up, even very small inaccuracies may translate into millions of dollars'
worth of lost billing.
Fluid Pricing models for cloud resources change. New offers and promotions have to be
taken into account. This would mean that the price compute layer on top of the metering
component would need to be flexible to incorporate changes into the pricing model.
Capable of Analytics Billions of resource transactions happen across public clouds every
day. All these transactions would need to be unified into easily consumable analytics for the
cloud provider to determine usage patterns, conduct auditing, discover possible leaks, and
lead toward more optimized cloud infrastructure. This is a big data problem where perhaps
tens of terabytes of data would need to be ingested and analyzed every day.

Ubiquitous Access

Every public cloud tenant or user should be able to connect to the platform and operate
their account over the Internet regardless of location or network technology, as long as the
technology is commonly used and supported by the cloud provider. The same would hold
true for custom private cloud implementations, with the only change being that the cloud
is usually locked behind a firewall with only authorized users allowed access. This is what
ubiquitous access guarantees. However, this does not mean that the public cloud providers
would not account for security consideration or honor the access limits set by a user.
In years past, users would have to go to a specialized physical location where a main-
frame was hosted or where thin clients were available to be able to get on the legacy cloud
platform and use or perform maintenance operations. Today, you can, for example, connect
to your Amazon cloud account anywhere and perform every operation that's available.