No Billing, no Cloud. Cloud Cruiser

To have a cloud as a business model, two things must happen by definition:

 1. A user will always have available  all resources s/he needs
 2.  A user will pay only for what it uses

The corollary of the above is that Data Center, outsourced or not, is transforming - for its owners - from a cost center, into a profit  center, once it becomes a cloud.

This is major shift  that started with  Amazon Web Services  sending  an INVOICE. This natural consequence of having resources available outside the organization  - like electricity, virtual nodes, storage and so on - is that the IT Director receives an invoice, and s/ he  does not know who should pay for it - triggered a need to keep track of all costs and invoice the responsible parties  inside or outside the organization.

In my opinion, the total cost of ownership (TCO) does not tell much about  Data Center. The Return on Investment (ROI) tells me not only how much the Data Center costs, but how much money the Data Center - once transformed into a cloud - make. It is the ROI, not the TCO, that gives power to the CIO and justifies its existence and its IT future growth.

No billing, no cloud. But with a cloud - we need the right tool. I learned at Cloud Connect 2012 about Cloud Cruiser.

Suppose we want to know how much the resource Open Stack costs over a window of time by department, we have this report:

Large organization want to restrict access to reports based by department and or management levels. Cloud Cruiser has a charming name for this restriction. They call it  "My Cloud". This is what limits the territory a given user.

"My cloud" assigns budget responsibilities to each department or manager. The user can set budgets - or assigned budgets top-down for each resource used. Then each time the resources are exceeded, or the trend analysis shows a date when will be exceeded with current consumption date, the software issues  a clear table of alerts. This is how it was done in time of mainframes, the problem is, resource budgets are not supposed to be part of the cloud, where one pays per usage..

Cloud Cruiser billing interpretation is deeply rooted in mainframe computing. They must first solve this chicken and the egg challenge, in my humble opinion.