[Openstack] [metering] resource metadata changes and billing

Julien Danjou julien at danjou.info
Mon Jul 2 21:54:20 UTC 2012


On Mon, Jul 02 2012, Doug Hellmann wrote:

> No, there are cases where the metadata will affect the rate. For instance,
> it costs a different amount to have an instance in each of Amazon's
> availability zones (data centers). The counter would still say that the
> instance has been running for a certain amount of time, but the *rate* for
> charging for that time would depend on where it is. A representative from
> HP requested the same thing in ceilometer, and we may use it at DreamHost,
> too, eventually.

I totally agree with you, Doug. I'm just saying that's it's not *only* a
metadata. The zone must be some kind of a meter, even if it's not
numeric. It should be a meter with a type that causes the resource (here
the instance) to be billed differently (and therefore to generate
multiple "objects" when returning resource usage metering).

Clearly the term meter is probably not the good one, maybe we should
split this, but to me it must be extracted from metadata to become
something more. Something we can rely on to take the decision that "this
is something worst splitting the metered resource in different parts
because the billing must change" (zone, RAM, flavor, volume size…).

Speaking of volume size, if you take the example of a storage volume,
you likely to have the same issue. You may not charge the same thing if
your volume total size is 1 GB or 10 GB, and if it has been resize you
want (not sure it's possible, but one day) to know when precisely.
Whereas size used is likely to be just a generic absolute meter.

> We probably have time to fix it before the release. On the other hand, it
> seems much more important to use work on writing data collectors (new
> pollsters, adding notifications to other projects, etc.). I don't think we
> can do both things.

Sure. Anyway, we both know that's a do-ocracy. :-)

-- 
/*  Julien Danjou
   ╭ Free Software hacker & freelance
   ╰ http://julien.danjou.info          */
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