Cyclops: Rating-Charging-BillingAbout Cyclops
Rating, Charging, and Billing are key activities that allows a service provider to fix monetary values for the resources and services it offers, and allows it to bill the customers consuming the services offered.
Description
Financial accounting is a very critical process in the monetization process of any service. In the telecommunication world, these processes have long been documented, used, and standardized. Cloud computing being a relatively new paradigm, is still undergoing a transition phase. Many new services are being defined and there is still a huge untapped potential to be exploited.
Problem Statement
Given a general service scenario, how can the key metrics be identified. The identification of measurable metrics is essential for determining a useful pricing function to be attached to the metric.
Granularity
Where is the correct boundary between real-time charging strategy, which could be very resource intensive, versus a periodic strategy which has the risk of over-utilization of resources by the consumers between two cycles.