Billing & Metering

Business Value: Know exactly what each tenant, cell, and user consumes — across every service category — with transparent, auditable showback and real-time quota enforcement. CCP FinOps capabilities turn opaque cloud spending into governed, visible, accountable resource consumption.

What Gets Metered

CCP meters all resource consumption through the orbiter-metering microservice, which tracks allocation events, usage durations, and consumption volumes across every service category.

Resource	What's Measured	Granularity
Virtual Machines	vCPU-hours, RAM-hours, flavor-hours from creation to deletion	Per VM, precise lifecycle timestamps
Container Clusters (CaaS)	Cluster-hours: creation to decommission; node-hours per worker node	Per cluster and per node
Bare Metal (BMaaS)	Node-hours from allocation to release; server type tracked	Per node, precise timestamps
Block Storage	GB-hours from volume creation to deletion; IOPS tier tracked	Per volume
Object Storage	GB-months of stored data; API request operations counted	Per bucket, per tenant
File Storage	GB-hours from provisioning to deletion; utilization vs. quota tracked	Per share
Archival Storage	GB-months at archival tier; retrieval requests counted separately	Per archive
Database Instances	Instance-hours from provisioning to deletion; edition and flavor tracked	Per instance
Load Balancers	LB-hours; data processed (GB); connection count	Per load balancer
VPN Gateways	Gateway-hours; data transferred (GB in/out)	Per gateway
Public IP Addresses	IP-hours from allocation to release	Per IP address
NAT Gateway	Gateway-hours; data processed (GB)	Per gateway
CDN (MVP2)	Data transferred (GB) per region; request count	Per distribution
Security Services	WAF request count; DDoS protection bandwidth; HSM key operations	Per service instance

Metering Architecture

The metering pipeline runs continuously, converting resource allocation events and usage data into structured consumption records.

Pipeline Stages

1. Event Capture: Resource lifecycle events (create, update, delete) generated by CCP microservices are published to the Kafka messaging queue by the ordr_mgmt service
2. Metering Service: orbiter-metering consumes events from Kafka; calculates usage durations and consumption quantities; persists records to the metering database
3. Usage Aggregation: Consumption records aggregated by tenant, cell, and resource type on configurable intervals
4. Showback Generation: Aggregated data converted into showback reports — human-readable consumption summaries for tenants and cells
5. Quota Evaluation: Real-time quota checks against current consumption; provisioning requests rejected when quotas are reached
6. Export: Showback and billing data exportable via portal or API for integration with external BSS/billing systems

Data Flow

Resource Action → ordr_mgmt (Kafka event) → orbiter-metering → Metering DB
                                                             → Quota Engine (real-time)
                                                             → Showback Reports
                                                             → BSS Portal Export

Quota Management

Quotas are enforced at two levels — Tenant and Cell — providing layered governance:

Tenant-Level Quotas

Set by the Platform Super Admin when creating or updating a tenant:

• Maximum vCPUs, RAM, and disk across all VMs in the tenant
• Maximum Kubernetes cluster count and total node count
• Maximum storage capacity (block, object, file) per tenant
• Maximum public IP addresses, VPN gateways, and load balancers
• Maximum DBaaS instances per engine type

Cell-Level Quotas

Set by Tenant Admins when creating or updating cells within their tenant. Cell quotas must be within the bounds of the tenant quota. This enables:

• Internal chargeback — allocate specific resource budgets per department or project
• Prevent any single cell from consuming all tenant resources
• Progressive allocation — start cells small, expand as workloads grow

Quota Enforcement

• Real-Time Blocking: Quota checks run before every resource creation operation. If the request would exceed the cell or tenant quota, it is rejected immediately with a clear error message indicating which quota was exceeded
• Visual Alerts: Portal dashboard shows quota utilization with color-coded warnings:
  • Green: below warning threshold
  • Yellow: between warning and critical threshold
  • Red: at or near quota limit
• Proactive Notifications: Configurable notifications when quota utilization reaches defined thresholds (e.g., 80% and 95%)
• No Silent Overrun: CCP never silently exceeds a quota. Every resource creation is evaluated against quota before provisioning begins

Showback and FinOps

Showback reports translate metering data into consumption summaries that enable FinOps governance:

Showback Reports

• Tenant Showback: Total resource consumption across all cells, services, and time periods for the tenant
• Cell Showback: Consumption breakdown per cell — identify which project or department is consuming the most resources
• Service Category Breakdown: Compute, storage, networking, databases, security — consumption per category for allocation analysis
• Trend Analysis: Historical consumption charts showing growth trends; capacity planning inputs
• Notional Invoicing: Apply rate cards to consumption records to generate notional (internal) invoices for chargeback

FinOps Disciplines Enabled by CCP Metering

• Cost Allocation: Map all resource consumption to specific tenants, cells, and users for accurate chargeback
• Optimization Insights: Identify underutilized VMs, oversized storage allocations, and idle resources
• Budget Control: Quota enforcement prevents uncontrolled spending growth; budget-conscious resource governance
• Accountability: Every resource attributed to a specific user and cell with creation and deletion timestamps

BSS Portal Integration

CCP metering integrates with the BSS Portal (ATB) for commercial cloud service provider deployments:

• Consumption data exported from orbiter-metering to BSS Portal on configurable schedule
• BSS Portal applies commercial rate cards to generate customer invoices
• Tenant and customer identities synchronized between BSS Portal and CCP Keycloak realms
• Customer onboarding in BSS Portal triggers tenant provisioning in CCP via API

Licensing

The orbiter-metering service also handles platform licensing:

• CCP platform license consumption tracked and reported
• Database license usage (Oracle, MS SQL) tracked per instance for compliance reporting
• Database license inventory managed in MVP2 Database Licenses service