A Model for Policy-Based Automation of Usage Accounting across Multiple Cloud Infrastructures

Cloud Computing provides flexible and dynamic provisioning of resources, services, and applications. As such, Cloud Computing is the ideal IT infrastructure for the ever changing workload of companies and service providers. Although, cloud providers offer functionality for usage accounting, this functionality is limited to their own requirements. Companies and service providers as cloud users have also a need for usage accounting, but with different requirements than the cloud providers. Additionally, cloud users are not limited to a single cloud, but make use of multiple cloud infrastructures and applications depending on their needs. Cloud users require a usage accounting infrastructure not only capable of supporting billing as an accounting application, but capable of supporting all kinds of applications. For example applications like cost allocation or trend analysis. In order to be able to manage such a complex and adaptable usage accounting infrastructure, we present a policy-based management approach. Policies are used as a high-level description of the intended behavior of the infrastructure which are then utilized to derive configurations for the infrastructure services. Such a solution ensures the efficient management and administration of complex usage accounting infrastructures.