A Service-Oriented Architecture for Billing Resources in IaaS Cloud Platforms

Cloud Computing is a recent paradigm where different IT resources, such as applications or hardware, are quickly provisioned to customers through a pay per use model. Many research studies have already been conducted concerning billing services for cloud computing, but they lack on flexibility to establish how resources are defined and monitored. In fact, current solutions seem also very dependent on specific cloud infrastructures. This paper proposes an architecture for billing cloud services decoupled from specific providers, named as aCCountS. This service is complemented by a Domain Specific Language that allows the specification of flexible pricing policies. Such policies aims at supporting cloud billing requirements collected from our literature survey, allowing pricing schemes that meet different customer profiles. Based on this architecture, a prototype has been implemented and tested to validate our proposal in two different cloud infrastructures. Experiments confirmed that (i) the architecture hasn't dependencies of specific IaaS provider and (ii) the charging procedures are done correctly.