A Flexible Billing Life Cycle for Cloud Services Using Augmented Customer Agreements

Abstract

Cloud computing constant evolution requires dynamic adjustments to service pricing and billing terms, considering provider infrastructures, customer requirements, and discount policies, among others. In this context, Customer Agreements (CA) are used to regulate the service provision including, among other information, the agreed service level in SLAs, pricing, and billing terms. Although many existing proposals and industrial tools support the definition of pricing and billing of cloud services, there is a lack in terms of customisation and automated monitoring tools integrated with the billing process. In this article, we provide a flexible billing proposal supporting CA that considers not only SLA terms but also customisable pricing and billing terms, possibly including compensations (i.e. discounts or overcharges) that apply when specified conditions are met. In addition, we developed an automated monitoring and analysis tool that we validate in a real-world industrial scenario. Moreover, we analyse and compare more than 50 existing industrial tools with our proposal, highlighting the advantages of its rule-based approach.

PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

“…Due to the lack of computing power and storage, their readings in the past might not be available for analytics. In contrast, the other two providers -denoted as P 1 cloud and P 4 cloud , harness cloud computing to provide the end-users with enriched data (e.g., spatio-temporal extrapolation) about water temperature and water pollution over a relatively large farming site, which they do not own. Hi-tech agencies such as P 1 cloud and P 4 cloud obtain the appropriate permission from the farm owners to operate their IoT devices, networking infrastructure, and cloud servers in the field crops of farmers.…”

“…The concept of SLA has been investigated to a great extent in service-oriented cloud computing and telecommunications. SLA research falls into the following directions [3], [4]: describing (i.e., formally representing the SLAs taking into account penalty rules) such as iAgree, 2 monitoring (keeping track of whether an SLA is respected during the execution of services), negotiation (mutually adapting an SLA while executing services to avoid a contract violation), and enforcement (executing the rule-based clauses stated in an SLA). Compared to research on the monitoring and negotiation of SLAs, there has been less intensive research on enforcement of SLAs so far.…”

“…• Second, we propose a distributed application architecture oriented towards Web3 that enforces penalty-aware SLAs and objectively calculates the reputation of service providers. 4 • Third, we conduct two scenario-based evaluations of PenChain discussing its use in the case of highprecision agriculture and in the case of automotive 4 Many intermediary websites that bring customers to businesses today still rely on customer feedback to calculate the average rating of a service provider, possibly resulting in unfair assessment and biased reputation [55], [56].…”

PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

“…The concept of SLA has been investigated to a great extent in service-oriented cloud computing and telecommunications. Research on SLAs falls into the following directions [3], [4]: describing (i.e., formally representing the SLAs taking into account the penalty rules) such as iAgree 2 , monitoring (keeping track of whether an SLA is respected during the execution of services), negotiation (mutually adapting an SLA while executing services to avoid a contract violation), and enforcement (executing the rule-based clauses stated in an SLA). Compared to research on monitoring and negotiation of SLAs, there has been less intensive research on enforcement of SLAs so far.…”

“…• Second, we propose a distributed application architecture oriented towards Web3 that enforces the penalty-aware SLAs and objectively calculates the service providers' reputation 4 . • Third, we conduct two scenario-based evaluations of PenChain by discussing its utilization in the case of high-precision agriculture and in the case of automotive manufacturing industry.…”