Multi-Cloud Entitlement Engine for Incremental Billing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current cloud-based platforms lack a centralized mechanism to track and aggregate resource consumption across multiple independent host clouds, making it difficult to enforce subscription limits and generate accurate incremental billing, especially when users operate virtual machines across diverse and shifting cloud environments.
Innovation Solution
A cloud management system that extracts local usage data from diverse host clouds, aggregates it, and applies subscription parameters to identify and manage incremental billing events through an entitlement engine, enabling centralized administration and billing across multiple clouds.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If a user operates virtual machines across multiple independent host clouds, then the user can leverage diverse cloud resources and scalability, but the ability to track and aggregate resource consumption across all clouds becomes difficult or impossible
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary billing platform that acts as a mediator between multiple independent host clouds and the user. This platform receives usage data from various clouds, aggregates it centrally, and applies subscription parameters to generate unified billing. The intermediary resolves the information loss by providing a centralized view of resource consumption across all clouds without requiring the clouds themselves to share data directly.
2Adaptability or versatility
If host clouds operate independently without shared usage data, then each cloud maintains operational autonomy and flexibility, but centralized tracking of subscription limits and incremental billing cannot be achieved
Solution Approach 1:
The billing platform serves as an intermediary that receives usage data from independent clouds without requiring them to change their operational independence. Each cloud continues to operate autonomously, sending usage data to the intermediary platform which then centralizes processing for subscription limit enforcement and incremental billing, thus maintaining cloud independence while enabling efficient centralized billing.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the billing and usage aggregation function from the individual host clouds and places it in a separate centralized platform. This extraction allows clouds to maintain their operational independence while the specialized billing platform handles the aggregation and enforcement of subscription limits, improving overall billing processing efficiency without compromising cloud autonomy.
3Ease of operation
If subscription limits are enforced on a per-cloud basis rather than aggregate, then each cloud can independently manage its resources, but the user's overall subscription compliance cannot be accurately determined
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the usage data from multiple clouds and the subscription parameter enforcement into a single centralized billing platform. Instead of enforcing limits separately at each cloud level, the system combines all usage data and applies subscription parameters aggregate to the user's total consumption across all clouds, ensuring accurate determination of overall subscription compliance while maintaining ease of cloud-level operations.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments relate to systems and methods for generating multi-cloud incremental billing capture and administration. A set of aggregate usage history data can store patterns for a user in a set of host clouds recording consumption of processor, memory, storage, operating system, or other resources subscribed to by the across the host clouds. The user can be a corporation or other collective user. An entitlement engine can access a set of subscription parameters and analyze the set of aggregate usage history data based on deviation from consumption limits or other subscription parameters. When resource limits (e.g. operating system instances) are exceeded in a host cloud, the entitlement engine can determine which resource was exceeded, and in which host cloud it was exceeded. Incremental billing for those events can be generated by the entitlement engine, and transmitted to the user via the host cloud and/or resource provider for presentation, collection, and reconciliation.