Elastic Disk Provisioning

How can the billing of cloud storage be based on actual, fluctuating storage consumption?

Problem

When cloud providers charge for fixed-disk storage allocation, the billing is based on the capacity of the disks, not their actual usage. As a result, cloud consumers are generally billed for more storage than they consume.

Solution

A dynamic storage provisioning system is established to dynamically allocate and remove (and collect billing data for) storage space at a granular level.

Application

Thin provisioning and dynamic allocation technology is used with cloud storage monitors to enable elastic storage space provisioning and the measuring of usage data for billing purposes.

Mechanisms

Cloud Storage Device, Cloud Usage Monitor, Container, Hypervisor, Pay-Per-Use Monitor, Resource Replication, Virtual Server

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 scenario based on the use of a dynamic-disk allocation based provisioning model.

A sample cloud architecture resulting from the application of the Elastic Disk Provisioning pattern.

The fixed-disk allocation based provisioning model compared to the dynamic disk provisioning model.

NIST Reference Architecture Mapping

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