Cyclops - Versatile billing engine made for clouds and beyond

Overview:

Cyclops is an open-source generic rating-charging-billing framework for clouds. It has first class support for OpenStack clouds and allows converged billing with IaaS + PaaS + SaaS scenarios. The generic rule-engine which powers the rating and charging micro-service allows a business to use Cyclops for variety of revenue management scenarios. It supports event based billing, resource usage based, as well as subscription based pricing and billing. Furthermore, it enables revenue sharing between cloud provider and various actors including application developers in a marketplace scenario, as well as resellers and distributors. 

Cyclops has been developed as part of European funded projects Mobile Cloud Networking and T-Nova where it has been deployed to do charging and billing for virtualised telco services deployment over OpenStack as well as integrated with the marketplace for VNFs and its deployment using ETSI MANO recommended orchestration mechanism (in T-Nova). Cyclops also is being deployed at SWITCH which is network and support service provider to SWISS academic institutions (similar to Geant in the EU) to enable cloud billing towards universities and other higher learning institutions in Switzerland. The talk will provide details of use cases from these large European projects and describe how Cyclops was used to enable proper revenue management in these use cases.

The rule engine in Cyclops is fully generic and can be programmed to enable federated cloud rating, charging and billing, the presentation will include a short ~2-3 minutes demo video showcasing the enablement of billing in a federated cloud environment, how the rules were programmed.

Target Audience:

The owners and operators of cloud infrastructures as well as service providers (Hadoop / Spark or other HPC clusters) are the primary target of this presentation. Developers and sysadmins who are looking to find a good accounting and billing tool for their environment as also encouraged to attend this presentation.

Benefits for Audience:

The participants will walk away with an in-depth understanding of Cyclops, architecture, capabilities and functions of all micro-services involved in the framework, hear about the various use-cases where Cyclops was already deployed and understand the setup and rules used for those use cases. Developers will find out about how to extend the collector framework to add new metering inputs into Cyclops for billing 3rd party or yet to be supported frameworks through Cyclops.

Topic 1: Challenges facing users and service providers