aCCountS: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Flexible Pricing in Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Computing is a recent paradigm where different IT resources such as applications or hardware are quickly provisioned to customers through a pay per use model. Substantial research has already been conducted concerning  pricing services in cloud computing, but they lack on flexibility to establish how services are accounted. These services seem also very dependent on specific cloud infrastructures. This paper proposes an architecture for charging cloud services decoupled from specific providers. This service is complemented by a domain specific language that allows the creation of flexible pricing policies. Such policies aims at supporting cloud billing requirements collected from a survey, allowing the construction of rules that meet different customer profiles. Based on this architecture, a prototype has been implemented and tested to validate our proposal in two different cloud infrastructures. These experiments aims at testing (i)  the correctness of the charging flow between two components (server and agent) and (ii)  the invoice calculation.