by Rich Bourdeau
Regardless of whose definition of cloud you may be using, the ability to measure and charge for specific services consumed is one of the core tenants of cloud computing. A while back I wrote 
a blog about how charging for service rendered will allow companies to move from the role of enforcer of who gets what services and how much to a role of a provider where you can get whatever services you want as long as you have the budget to pay for these services. This is such a fundamental shift in the way business have historically funded IT investments that implementing true metering and chargeback has been a lower priority for most companies.
Although lower in priority than automating service delivery, chargeback is still viewed as an important attribute of most companies who are deploying private and hybrid clouds. Although it may not initially be their top implementation priority companies want to know that their cloud management platform has the these capabilities and most companies will start by implementing some form of showback initially as a precursor to full chargeback at some point in time.
Regardless if you want to implement full chargeback or just some limited form of showback, here are some capabilities you will want to make sure your cloud management platform has.
- Part 2 – Understand Your Costs
- Part 3 – Establishing the Price of Your Services
- Part 4 – Compare Your Costs to Public Cloud Alternatives
- Part 5 – Influence Consumption by Showing Costs
- Part 6 – Provide Reports to the Business
How VMware vRealize Suite Helps
In this series of blog posts I will look at each these topics in detail, so that you have a better understanding of the resource costing and chargeback capabilities you should be looking for in your cloud management platform. We will also look at the power of the vRealize Suite platform and how the automation, operations and business management components work together to deliver superior costing, metering and chargeback capabilities.
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