Introducing it chargeback monitoring private cloud use

One problem that restricts private cloud adoption within an enterprise is the return of shared resources to business units that use private cloud. For companies with very tight budgets and the inability of independent departments to get along and learn well together, it&http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/37954.html ">nbsp; Chargeback become a problem facing the company. This is true in most companies.

Fortunately, you can use a lot of third-party outsourcing and services to track your private cloud computing use. These tools are loosely coupled with core applications and cloud services as additional external applications. Some exist in terminals, and some are public cloud services that you can subscribe to. Although this technique has many names, I prefer to refer to this technique as "bookkeeping based on usage".

The right approach and technology can meet the requirements of private cloud services and businesses. In some cases, it teams are trying to build internal accounting tools. However, considering that technology is easy to buy-as long as you choose the right type, this is usually not a good way to go.

Once you've chosen an accounting technology based on usage, you'll need to decide how you want to pay for IT services and resources. Most private cloud services are settled by using the chargeback services of the same enterprise, using internal dollars to pay internal bills.

Although the private cloud internal settlement methods you use may vary, I tend to divide them into the following four common models:

Self-help bill

Time Billing

Quantity bill

Instance Bill

Use these four methods to simulate a public cloud provider.

The "Buffet" method can be used for tracking service, but consumers (i.e., internal end users/business units) can use as many services as possible and pay a flat rate. If you do not want to limit the user's access to the service, and you understand that maintaining a system for monitoring detailed use is cumbersome and not worthwhile, then that is true, since it does not normally require an accounting tool based on usage.

Although this is the simplest option, it is also the most popular. The company that deploys the private cloud estimates the usage of each internal entity resource. It resources have a specified amount of dollars and remove some money from the entity's budget each month.

The drawback of the buffet approach is that while some entities do a good job-that is, the cost of the primary user of the private cloud service is spent on entities that do not have much use for the private cloud. It's like a gym member who has given up on New Year's resolutions.

"Time Billing", as you wish, to track the amount of time spent on IT services and to track bills based on a set of time prices. An accounting system based on usage can advertise the use of IT resources and create bills for you. Then deduct the cash from the budget based on the time the consumer uses the private cloud computing service.

The advantage of time billing is that business units only need to pay for the time they use the private cloud service, so they can better understand utilization and billing according to usage. However, time is not always a good indicator of resource use. For example, when two entities are charged a one-hour private cloud service, one entity private cloud usage may already be saturated, while another entity's use of the meter has barely been skipped.

The "Quantity bill" model means that IT pros pay for the amount of data that the consumer transmits between private clouds, typically megabytes or gigabytes. Similarly, the use of data is tracked and the bill is automatically delivered to consumers of private cloud services.

While this may seem more reasonable than the time billing model, in reality the data that is passed back and forth between private clouds is not a good indicator of the use of internal cloud resources. It is more just a conversation with the requesting system or user.

The "instance billing" model may be the best way to use private cloud resources. In short, IT Pros focus on the number of instances, such as storage and computing services, that use private clouds to spin up and down. This will give you a more accurate look at who does what and with what, so it can help you determine how much they should charge.

I suspect that the use-based bookkeeping of private clouds will grow a lot in the next few years, taking into account the growth of private clouds and tighter it budgets. Who knows, this might be a good way for it to learn more about their end users.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)