CYCLOPS: A micro service based approach for dynamic rating, charging & billing for cloud

In the present days of rapid adoption of cloud services and varying cost models it is imperative to have a system which converts the cloud resource usage data into a measurable and payable cost. The system should be able to collect the cloud resource usage data, process it against a dynamically determined rate to get a charge for which the customer could be billed upon. These operations need to be done in a secured manner with appropriate authentication and authorization checks. As the cloud services are still evolving, the rating, charging and billing components for cloud are at a nascent stage of its maturity. In this paper we are describing a novel modular and micro services based design & architecture for developing a dynamic rating, charging and billing for cloud service providers with emphasis being given to the validation of the architecture through mathematical modeling and the implementation experience of the micro services.

I. Introduction

To any service provider, it is important for being able to record the details of a client's resource consumption and determine a way to charge the user for that use. In telecommunication industry, the process of determining a payable cost for the service used is through the process of rating, charging and billing. Rating is the process of defining a base rate for a fundamental unit of a resource (data, bandwidth, etc.). As per the definitions of European Telecommunication Standards Institute's specifications, Charging is a process where information related to a chargeable event is collected, formatted and transferred in order to make it possible to determine usage for which the charged party may be billed. The collected information are in the form of Charge Data Records (CDR). A CDR is a formatted collection of information about a chargeable event (e.g. time of call setup, duration of the call, amount of data transferred, etc) for use in billing and accounting. Billing is a function whereby CDRs generated by the charging function(s) are transformed into bills requiring payment [1].