Abiquo supports two basic charging models for cloud resources:
Allocation – where customers are allocated a pool of cloud resources (vCPU,vRAM,storage etc.) and are charged for those resources regardless of whether they are consumed or not
Consumption – where customers are charged for the resources they have actually consumed, typically on an hourly basis.
However, the needs of Abiquo customers are often more complex with discounts, commitment, burst and many other models coming into effect and in order to meet those customer needs, and to also deliver flexible accounting and billing solutions Abiquo have developed a billing plugin integration.
This allows Abiquo’s rich set of raw data (allocation, and consumption) to be imported to an easy to read CSV file, or directly to a billing solution such as Aria, Zuora, Ubersmith or CloudCruiser. Billing data can be aggregated in a number of different ways by Abiquo in order to support a variety of different tennant models.
As well as standard resources such as vRam, vCPU, and Storage, Abiquo can also provide accounting data for other services that may incur additional costs on the cloud platform. Functionality such as reserved hardware, high availability can all be metered, along with additional resources such as specific template images or hypervisors.
The billing integration also supports custom connectors. Allowing data from third party sources (e.g. networking bandwidth) to also be tracked and aggregated with other usage data that will form the final bill.
Click here to learn more about the Abiquo billing integration or click here to find out more about Accounting in Abiquo.