Pay-as-you-go is one of the key characteristics that makes cloud computing appealing for businesses. Hence, it is an essential requirement for a cloud computing service to support metering, throttling and billing.
WSO2 StratosLive has comprehensive support for billing and metering.
What is Metering?
Metering is the basis for throttling and billing. Metering measures levels of resource utilization, such as network bandwidth usage and data storage volume, consumed by the cloud services subscribers, aka tenants.
Resource utilizations (bandwidth and storage usage) are measured on the fly and the measured data stored for summarizing and analyzing.
What is Throttling?
Throttling is the process of access and usage controlling based on a set of rules. Throttling rules are run against the metered data. Throttling rules define the upper limits for resource utilization. Access control to cloud computing services will be governed by throttling module that evaluate throttling rules. If the current metered utilization is below the allowed upper limits, access will be granted, else revoked.
What is Billing?
Billing is the process where the cloud computing service subscribers are charged based on the metered data. Billing usually happens on a monthly basis. Billing uses pricing rates defined against usage plans and compute the invoice against the usage data.
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