Scalable Metering for an Affordable IT Cloud Service Management

As the cloud services journey through their life-cycle towards commodities, cloud service providers have to carefully choose the metering and rating tools and scale their infrastructure to effectively process the collected metering data. In this paper, we focus on the metering and rating aspects of the revenue management and their adaptability to business and operational changes. We design a framework for IT cloud service providers to scale their revenue systems in a cost-aware manner. The main idea is to dynamically use existing or newly provisioned SaaS VMs, instead of dedicated setups, for deploying the revenue management systems. At on-boarding of new customers, our framework performs off-line analysis to recommend appropriate revenue tools and their scalable distribution by predicting the need for resources based on historical usage. This allows the revenue management to adapt to the ever evolving business context. We evaluated our framework on a test bed of 20 physical machines that were used to deploy 12 VMs within Open Stack environment. Our analysis shows that service management related tasks can be offloaded to the existing VMs with at most 15% overhead in CPU utilization, 10% overhead for memory usage, and negligible overhead for I/O and network usage. By dynamically scaling the setup, we were able to reduce the metering data processing time by many folds without incurring any additional cost.