A Synchronization Mechanism for Cloud Accounting Systems

In current cloud systems, services run across multiple geographically distributed clusters and continuously generate resource usage data due to constant resource consumption. In the context of accounting, resource usage data generated from each cluster during service runtime must be collected and aggregated into a single cloud-wide record so that a single bill can be created. This paper presents a mechanism to synchronize accounting records among distributed accounting system peers. Run time resource usage generated from different clusters is synchronized to maintain a single cloud-wide view of the data so that a single bill can be created. We provide a set of accounting system requirements and an evaluation which verifies that the solution fulfills these requirements. Experimental results show that our solution produces less overhead in terms of data exchange and scales near-linearly with the size of clusters with no single point of failure.