Enterprise Cloud Billing: Adjust and Conquer

Maestro billing engine allows transforming virtual and hardware capacities utilization into bills, based on the events within their timeline, and states they get as a result of such events

However, the modern world, with its dynamic changes in situations and requests, needs flexibility – and in billing, as well.

The hourly cost of your datacenter maintenance may depend on external factors, like varying electricity costs (for example, cheaper night hours), which can let you make nightly hours of your infrastructure usage be also more affordable. You may also want to re-distribute the load between data centers or data center sections during peak hours by offering lower prices in underutilized zones, and higher prices – in those that are overloaded.  Season discounts, special offerings, and other pricing alterations are also on the list.

You even may want to apply extra charges for your users access to public clouds, by adding a respective coefficient to the native provider’s bill.

So, there are endless cases when being flexible is necessary.

How does Maestro billing engine cope with this?

Pricing Policies Ad-Hoc Adjustments

To build a flexible billing strategy for your enterprise cloud, Maestro billing engine allows switching active pricing policies on the go, without interruptions into the workflow and without affecting the whole system accessibility for your users.

A policy can have an exact start and end date, as well as a CRON schedule for repetitive activation. 
When uploaded, the policies are automatically switched by the engine, according to their specified on/off time. The update does not interfere with the whole system and does not need manual verification.

A standard policy is an .xml file describing all the parameters of the policy, providing constant pricing based on resources configuration and location.

For complex cases and intricated logic, you can implement your own formula and provide it as Java function policy. Such function needs a small amount of required standard parameters, such as vmCpuCount, or volSizeGB, and you can add any amount of your own values and calculations to get the result.

At the moment, the number of output parameters is limited to CPU, Memory, and Windows License. Adding new output parameters need creating additional cost objects.

To modify a price you do not always need to specify all the parameters from scratch. You can set a night plan, for example, as 5% cheaper than the daytime one, and the peak time as 5% more expensive than the other daytime

Public Providers Cost Management

Within an enterprise cloud, using public providers is often inevitable.

It is important not only to have the ability to bring both public and private billing information into a unified format for centralized review, but also to alter the resulting costs to fit your corporate business needs.

For example, provide extra discounts or additional fees for using public clouds via your platform.

Maestro billing engine allows achieving this by applying coefficients to the costs received from the public cloud providers.

Sharing Public Cloud Costs

On enterprise level, there are often situations when shared infrastructure is used by different teams.

For example, there is a team enabling access to virtual workspaces in AWS for the whole enterprise. And there are users among various projects who use these workspaces. To make accounting for the used resources adequate within the enterprise, Maestro billing engine allows to move parts of a public provider’s costs from one team to another, thus effectively distributing the expenses among actual users.

Vice versa, there may be costs on the teams, associated with general enterprise processes, for example, enabling necessary security level. The costs for the related public infrastructure can be assigned to a centralized responsible team.           

Cherry on Top

The Billing Engine flexibility and usability is firmly supported by a set of convenient administering tools that allow not only to manage the pricing policies, but also to log and review all the changes and actions related to the billing policies.

The Engine stores all information about each policy start and stop time, and, if available, schedules, so that you can always trace back the history of changes and investigate any question related to cost generation within your enterprise.

In addition, Maestro billing engine is able to perform the necessary chargeback-related operations, as real-life access to the current and historical billing information and billing month closure, which includes additional verifications and checks.

As a result, we are having a powerful solution foe establishing effective and transparent cost allocation for both virtual and hardware resources within your organization.

Later in our blog, we will give a couple of insights on our experience in corporate billing system organizing, on practice.