CYCLOPS: A micro service based approach for dynamic rating, charging & billing for cloud

In the present days of rapid adoption of cloud services and varying cost models it is imperative to have a system which converts the cloud resource usage data into a measurable and payable cost. The system should be able to collect the cloud resource usage data, process it against a dynamically determined rate to get a charge for which the customer could be billed upon. These operations need to be done in a secured manner with appropriate authentication and authorization checks. As the cloud services are still evolving, the rating, charging and billing components for cloud are at a nascent stage of its maturity. In this paper we are describing a novel modular and micro services based design & architecture for developing a dynamic rating, charging and billing for cloud service providers with emphasis being given to the validation of the architecture through mathematical modeling and the implementation experience of the micro services.