Background
Cloud computing is not an option anymore, rather it is the
standard for businesses to run their applications. Cloud
computing
helps orchestrate IT infrastructure and provide IT services as a commodity on a
services based model. For businesses either renting these services or owning
them privately, it is implied that the Cloud
Service Providers provide insights with respect to resource utilization and
metering for capital management and auditing.
Each cloud service provider has his own way
of deploying resources and metering them, and that differs from the traditional
IT business model, from procuring resources to providing them for deploying
services. Improved IT infrastructure management, granularity in resource
metering and ability to determine expenditure per service, changes the capital
expenditure model to an operational expenditure model.
CIOs who
know where their money comes from are in better control of their finances.
Charge-back or show back can help to engage the business in IT spending and
value, but the effort must be worthwhile. Some CIOs simply want to stop the
business from consuming more and more IT while blaming them for the cost and
asking them to make it cost less.
Well-implemented
charge-back can make the relationship between spending and revenue more
transparent and intuitive. This reduces the need for expensive governance
committee meetings and management interventions, freeing the organization to
focus on optimizing all business spending.
Charge-back
is often a source of contention between IT executives and business leaders, but
it need not be. CIOs can use charge back to transform their team's
relationships with business stakeholders, improve financial transparency, and
gain additional funding.
As a
cost-center, IT budget always comes from charge-back against the organization's
business revenue, even in cases where the IT organization does not directly
charge back for IT services.
Organizations
that lack financial transparency in their service delivery are vulnerable to
time consuming audits and unbudgeted tax invoices.
Public cloud service providers, handle the overhead of
managing IT hardware infrastructure while organizations can focus on their core
business functionality. In private cloud set up owned by organizations, the
entire stack is managed by the owner or outsourced to third party service
integrators. In both cases regular insights on resource metering with respect
to cost is required for planning and correct strategic decisions.
Efficient IT
infrastructure management is incomplete without aligning IT resources with
cost. It is also essential to map the consumption of these resources per user
in order to determine efficiency and profitability. Gathering data and
generating insights is necessary for continuous improvement and getting maximum
returns on investments.
Multi-Billing in eNlight Cloud Platform
eNlight Cloud Platform goes out of the box with cloud metering and billing. Being a
leader in cloud orchestration software, the platform provides IT infrastructure
management, enables application deployment on virtualized resources,
multi-tenant operations and multi or flexible billing models.
At the base
level eNlight Cloud Platform
provides virtual machine resources metering. Real time processor, memory, disk
and bandwidth utilization is provided for static as well as dynamically
auto-scalable virtual machines. These resources can be directly mapped with per
unit utilization and that provides statistics with respect to monetary
utilization of resources.
eNlight platform’s multi or flexible billing
module combined with multi-tenant architecture, enables businesses gather
monetary resource consumption statistics at a business unit, department and
individual user level. The cloud
platform provides multiple billing models that match almost all business
models like:
1. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume
2. Fixed Pay-Per-Use
3. Service-Based Billing
Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing
Charging
resources based upon consumption against allocation is Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume
billing. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing leverages eNlight Cloud Platform’s Auto
scaling technology to provide charge back mechanism for IT resources based
upon consumption rather than allocated resources.
eNlight enables users to deploy auto-scalable virtual
machines that scale dynamically as per resource requirement. Compute resources
are allocated and deallocated from the virtual machine in real-time. Due to
auto scaling virtual machines can
run at bare minimum resources and can demand resources as and when required.
For example, a virtual machine can run with minimum 2 vCPU and 2GB RAM at 02.00
am and can demand 4 to 6 vCPU and 12 to 16GB RAM in the peak time at 12 pm.
This leads to dynamic resource utilization, having wavy resource utilization
graphs.
eNlight Cloud Platform allows billing of such
dynamic resources at the granularity of minutes. Dynamic virtual machines are
provisioned with min / max resource capping. These virtual machines scale between the min / max resource caps. At any
point the virtual machine would be consuming resources in between that resource
capping. In this case dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing allows dynamic resource
metering and charge these consumed resources based upon the per unit rates
defined in eNlight cloud platform’s
charge back system.
The
platform’s auto scaling feature enables achievement of greater server
consolidation ratio while Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing enables cloud resource
metering based upon consumption of these auto-scalable
virtual machines.
Fixed Pay-Per-Use Billing
Charging
resources based upon allocation is Pay-Per-Use Billing. Essentially it is
direct billing based upon the units allocated from the pool of cloud resources. As opposed to Dynamic
Pay-Per-Consume billing, Fixed Pay-Per-Use billing charges resources based upon
their allocation. This is the conventional billing model that the entire cloud
market implements.
In eNlight Cloud Platform, a virtual machine with fixed resources
can be provisioned which are known as Static Virtual Machines. For example, a
VM with 8 vCPU and 12 GB RAM. The resource consumption of static virtual
machine equals to the allocated resources. This leads to fixed resource
utilization, where the resources can be charged on fixed flat rates.
Services-Based Billing
Charging tenants based upon service deployment is
Service Based Billing.
In eNlight Cloud Platform, a service can
be deployed in the form of group of related resources. For example, a mail
service which consists of email server and backup servers; this group of
resources can be charged flat based upon the charges and policies defined in eNlight Cloud Portal’s system.
Service-Based
Billing is different from Pay-Per-Consume and Pay-Per-Use in a sense that it
enables to set flat rates and charge group of services based upon these rates
defined in the system. This flat charge-back model allows to group application
deployments and resources under one common financial entity and simplify
billing of related resources.
Conclusion
Cloud is de
facto approach to deploy services and manage IT infrastructure, and having a
clear view of resource metering from a financial perspective is critical. eNlight Cloud Platform provides
multiple options a charge back models that suits almost all business
requirements. Service Based Billing enables charging group of resources with
fixed flat rates across different services deployed across departments or
business units.
eNlight provides highly granular resource utilization
metering which can be charged using Pay-Per-Consume and Pay-Per-Use billing
models. Pay-Per-Use billing provides more control and better granularity in
terms of charging IT resources. These resources are charged against static
utilization while different rates per unit can be configured in the system.
Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing model is exclusive to the platform which
leverages eNlight’s patented auto-scaling
technology to provide charge back mechanism for dynamically scaled
resources in real time.
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