Billing Event Aggregation with De-duplication
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Solution Overview
Problem
Maintaining accurate account balances for numerous consumers across a provider's accounts is operationally complex, especially with thousands or millions of accounts and numerous events affecting each balance, leading to challenges in billing cycles and potential double billing.
Innovation Solution
A computing system partitions events by account identifier, processes them through channels, and aggregates data using an aggregator that performs de-duplication to ensure accurate billing statements, reducing the risk of double billing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If a provider tracks account balances for thousands or millions of consumers with hundreds or thousands of events per account, then billing accuracy can be maintained, but operational complexity increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the billing process into distinct components: event sources generate events, channels partition and route events based on account identifiers, and aggregators consolidate events by account. This segmentation allows the system to handle millions of accounts and thousands of events per account while maintaining billing accuracy through structured data flow and reducing operational complexity through specialized processing at each stage.
2Productivity
If events are processed without de-duplication, then processing speed is faster, but double billing errors occur
Solution Approach 1:
The aggregator performs de-duplication of events as a preliminary action before final billing calculation. By identifying and removing duplicate events at the aggregation stage, the system prevents double billing errors while maintaining processing efficiency. The de-duplication mechanism compares event identifiers and consolidates duplicate events, ensuring billing reliability without significantly impacting overall processing speed.
Data Source
AI summary
Scalable handling of billing events that affect one or more accounts. A computing system partitions received events into a number of channels, perhaps by account identifier. The channels receive the events, process the events, and forwards the events to an aggregator to allow the events to be aggregated by account to allow for easier computation of a bill. The aggregator also performs de-duplication of events to help reduce the risk of double billing.