A Scalable Accounting Solution for Prepaid Services in Cloud Systems

Prepaid charging, an essential option for the accounting of cloud services, provides effective financial control for both service providers and customers. However, it has to be supported by real-time credit checking and cost calculation. These real-time actions consume resources of the providers´ network and impose high overhead. To tackle this issue, we present a scalable accounting solution in which an accounting component is hosted in every cluster constituting a cloud system. Each of our accounting component supervises service consumptions based on a calculated interval of a service bundle that is composed of all services hosted in a cluster and consumed by one customer simultaneously. Credit will be re-allocated when a customer´s credit in one cluster is not enough to compensate further usage, and the allocation is performed based on service consumptions. This work is intended to reduce the cost of prepaid services and to ensure service provision is not hampered by the charging part. Additionally, we perform theoretical and experimental analyses that indicate this work can provide an inexpensive accounting solution for the long-lived services in storage clouds.