Pay-as-You-Go

How can a cloud consumer be billed accurately for the actual amount of its IT resource usage?

Problem

Purchasing or leasing an entire IT resource can lead to fees significantly disproportionate to the actual amount that the IT resource is utilized.

Solution

A system is introduced to measure actual IT resource consumption at a granular level and to correspondingly bill only for the measured usage.

Application

Runtime usage monitoring is enabled to track actual IT resource usage and a billing system is established to process collected usage data into billing information.

Mechanisms

Billing Management System, Cloud Usage Monitor, Container, Pay-Per-Use Monitor

Compound Patterns

Burst In, Burst Out to Private Cloud, Burst Out to Public Cloud, Cloud Authentication, Cloud Balancing, Elastic Environment, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Isolated Trust Boundary, Multitenant Environment, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Resilient Environment, Resource Workload Management, Secure Burst Out to Private Cloud/Public Cloud, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A basic cloud architecture resulting from the application of the Pay-as-You-Go pattern.

An example of a cloud architecture comprised of pay-per-usage and billing components.

NIST Reference Architecture Mapping

This pattern relates to the highlighted parts of the NIST reference architecture, as follows: