Consumer Side Resource Accounting in the Cloud

Abstract

Abstract. The paper investigates the possibility of consumer side resource accounting of cloud services, meaning, whether it is possible for a consumer to independently collect all the resource usage data required for calculating billing charges for pay-per-use cloud services. The accounting models of two widely used cloud services are examined and possible sources of difficulties are identified, including causes that could lead to discrepancies between the metering data collected by the consumer and the provider. The investigation is motivated by the fact that cloud service providers perform their own measurements to collect usage data, but as yet there are no equivalent facilities of consumer-trusted metering that are commonly provided by utility service providers like gas and electricity. The paper goes on to suggest how cloud service providers can improve their accounting models to facilitate the task of consumer side resource accounting.

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

“…Both monitoring methods and data should be accessible to customers, in order to allow them to validate the billing process and claim any miscalculation due to SLA violations not considered by the provider. Unfortunately, it is not always that way [7].…”

“…Specifically, the experiments ecosystem 7 of the testbed is based on a core runner that generates a CA and metrics data based on a set of parameters, and then requests a billing generation from the prototype, measuring its performance. In this context, the different experiments are defined by means of scripts that parameterize the core runner with a specific configuration.…”

“…Focusing on proposals related to the billing process and life cycle, several works can be found [7], [22]- [27]. Among them, one of most relevant is CYCLOPS [22].…”

“…Apart from billing generation, which is the main concern of our work, there are also proposals focused on validation and estimation. For instance, in [7] Mihoob et al introduce improvements on accounting models for providers to make easier both billing validation and estimation, so avoiding discrepancies between providers and customers. It applies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).…”

Consumer-centric resource accounting in the cloud

“…a A note on terminology: 'accountability' refers to concepts such as responsibility, answerability, trustworthiness; not to be confused with 'resource accounting' that refers to the process concerned with calculating financial charges. b This paper combines and extends the material presented in two conference papers [21,22]. c S3 servers are synchronised to the Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) which is also known as the Zulu Time (Z time) and in practice equivalent to the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).…”