Monext: An Accounting Framework for Infrastructure Clouds

Cloud Accounting refers to how cloud usage is recorded and charged. Even in the case of a single cloud provider this task is hard and there is a context which it becomes even worse, known as federated cloud. It happens when a cloud provider dynamically outsources resources to other providers in response to demand variation. In this context, we identified some research addressing this area which developed platforms for federated clouds, however without addressing the accounting requirement. This work presents the Monext, an accounting framework for Infrastructure as a Service, focused on federated clouds. It is based on a standard accounting process, follows a set of principles specified by previous research, and offers a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to define charging policies. We evaluated the framework under a federated cloud platform called JiTCloud. The results provided evidences that Monext can be considered feasible under many aspects, such as flexibility, reliability and efficiency.