Cloud metering and billing exactly how you want it!

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.

With eNlight Cloud Platform’s, multi-billing combined with multi-tenant architecture CxO’s can experience the next generation IT resource management from a single cloud management portal.

Flexible Cloud Billing Models on eNlight Cloud Platform

The adoption of cloud computing is increasing rapidly due to its impact and improvements in business processes due to its advantages. A lot of benefits can be reaped by implementing cloud computing according to one’s business needs. Cloud computing has set a certain standard for organizations to run their business critical applications on its platform. Now-a-days organizations can largely benefit from a cost-effective cloud solution which instantly provides on-demand services to clients at an affordable price.

 Aligning resources with the IT budget helps in minimizing the redundant costs which are associated with cloud based services. IT heads do not consider the cloud billing system and thus obtain resources which they are probably not going to use. Cloud service provider allocates the resources demanded by a customer but even after the fact only half of the resources were used, the customer still needs to pay full amount due to the CSP’s billing norms which indirectly results in customer’s loss of money. Capacity planning is very important when you wish to use cloud services and distribute it among various departments in your organization.

Cloud promises a very cost efficient way to do business and it is the only reason why more than half of the businesses have started switching to cloud platform because it offers a great way to get maximum resources where they only have to pay for the resources consumed which is a better option than traditional system which needs upfront costs. Now-a-days cloud services are billed based on their usage and there is various consumption based business models in the market who only charge you for the amount of resources you have consumed. Metering of your used resources and costs affiliated with it give a very clear picture to the organization of current resource usage and spending scenario that helps them to take more informed decisions and this is also a good practice to measure your usage of virtual resources on the cloud platform.

Many-a -times there are resources which are unused like RAM, CPU and disk space for which the IT manager needs to pay the full amount even if only half of the allocated resources are used. The concept of Charge-back and Show back can help a business to engage in IT spending and value through responsible accounting of resources and the departments which consume these resources. CIOs want to analyze the resources which are allotted to each department and study their consumption through analysis because they do not want to pay additional costs for the resources which they are not going to consume.

Every department or individual who are allocated their own set of resources needs to efficiently use this IT service and should be responsible for the significant expenses. Charge-back system also helps organizations to achieve greater profitability by creating transparency in business decisions

Multi-Billing in eNlight Cloud Platform

 ESDS’ eNlight Cloud Platform comes with Cloud Metering and Billing for optimum utilization of resources and paying for only those services which you have consumed. A true leader in Cloud orchestration software, eNlight Cloud Platform provides easy IT infrastructure management, enables customers to seamlessly deploy applications on virtualized resources, offers Multi-Tenancy and Multi-Billing models.

eNlight Cloud Platform’s Multi-Billing Module is consolidated with Multi-Tenant Architecture enables businesses to gather information of monetary resources consumption on business, department or individual level. eNlight Cloud Platform smartly maps per unit utilization of resources like real-time processor, memory, disk space and bandwidth and then provides statistics regarding the usage bill for the same. eNlight Cloud Platform provides multiple billing models, which suite almost all business models, they are 

1. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume
2. Fixed Pay-Per-Use
3. Service Based Billing

Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing

When you consume certain resources & are charged for the resources which are allocated to you then it is known as Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing. eNlight Cloud Platform provides Charge-back mechanism through its Auto-Scaling technology which focuses on the resources consumed rather than the allocated resources. eNlight Cloud Platform lets you deploy virtual machines which can scale dynamically as per the users’ activity. A user can easily allocate and deallocate compute resources whenever needed which directly leads to efficient use of resources.

Dynamic virtual machines use resources between the resource capping which is set. Minimum and Maximum resource capping is set for virtual machines to scale between these limits. Through dynamic resource metering, a bill is generated for the consumption of resources which were used based upon the per unit rates according to eNlight Cloud Platform’s Charge-back mechanism. A user can achieve maximum benefit through the auto-scalable virtual machines which will only charge them for the resources which are consumed.

Fixed Pay-Per-Use Billing

When you charge a user based on the consumption of resources then it is pay-per-consume but when there are fixed units (resource) which are allocated to a user then it is essentially a direct billing model which is known as Fixed Pay-Per-Use Billing. This is the kind of billing model which is implemented by the entire cloud market. On eNlight Cloud Platform, static virtual machine is provided with fixed resources which is equals to the resources consumed and the billing is fixed. This leads to fixed resource utilization, where the resources can be charged on fixed flat rates.

Services Based Billing

There are multiple services offered by eNlight Cloud Platform and those tenants who wish to deploy a certain service are charged based upon service deployment which is known as Service Based Billing. A particular service can be provided to a customer along with the resources related to it like additional storage services, backup, security services etc. This package can be a service which is offered to a customer and can be charged individually based on single service utilization.

This billing model is very different from the previous 2 billing models because here the rates are flat and fixed and will not change according to the consumption or allocation of resources to a customer. The flat rate charge-back model allows group application deployments and resources under one single financial plan for simple billing.

Conclusion

Cloud offers various services and there are multiple options to choose from when it comes to deploying a service according to your needs. The multiple billing models help a customer to choose from various suite of options which is fit for one’s business requirement. The charge-back model offered by eNlight Cloud Platform suits almost all the business requirements.
Proper resource utilization models like Pay-Per-Use and Pay-Per-Billing allows a customer to meter their resource consumption and not pay any additional charges. When a customer has fixed resource utilization per month then there isn’t a best option than eNlight Cloud Platform’s Pay-Per-Billing model. All these billing models put together along with Multi-Tenant Architecture; CXOs can experience a whole new level of IT resource management through a single cloud management portal.