CloudStack powered public clouds have a distinct advantage of high efficiency, limitless scalability and faster deployment. Because of its less complex and robust nature, it has become one of the preferred orchestration platforms for building public, private and hybrid clouds. Along with support for multi-hypervisor, multi-tenant, high availability cloud infrastructure, it also provides automation for the creation, provisioning and configuration of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) components. Being hypervisor agnostic it simplifies the entire process of smoothly running a cloud service.
However, for any cloud deployment, large or small, there are two functional aspects for successfully running a cloud business – operational functions such as day-to-day infrastructure management and business functions such as subscriber management, billing, reporting etc.
Essentially, apart from seamless automation of operational tasks, running a public cloud service also requires strategic planning for business functions such as a billing system that can present clear and transparent usage, consumption, metering and billing for each subscribed user. Many times however, cloud service providers have to turn to third party integrations to manage business functions such as billing, invoicing, etc. CloudStack presents a range of APIs for integration with other platforms for handling the non-technical aspects of managing a cloud. This creates silos in cloud management.
This is where apiculus brings it all together and offers cloud service providers with a unified platform for end-to-end cloud management.
apiculus – for cloud management, billing and more
For CloudStack based clouds, apiculus acts as an experiential layer on top of systems that ensures that service providers can perform end-to-end management via a single pane of glass. Apart from the ability to automate operational tasks for cloud services, apiculus also caters to the billing, financial and support management without leaving the cloud management platform (CMP). With apiculus, CloudStack powered clouds can set up and manage subscription billing and monetise Anything as a Service (XaaS) cloud. It offers cloud service providers multiple ways to sell cloud – whether billing for hourly VM usage or selling metered cloud and charging only for the resources consumed over time.
With apiculus, you can also sell fixed size clouds, flexible clouds and more. It’s extremely user friendly and allows you to manage cloud resources as well as billing all within the same interface.
How does apiculus simplify billing for your CloudStack powered public cloud?
The apiculus billing system is modelled around the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS billing patterns and includes features for the modern-day subscription billing.
With apiculus, CloudStack based clouds can take advantage of the following features:
- The mode of billing is in arrears making the process easier to manage for service providers.
- Billing frequencies can be set for various resources. Hourly, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly billing can be set allowing service providers with fine grained control over how they wish to deliver their services.
- Invoices can be raised for a definite period of time. The invoice period is 1 month making it more manageable.
- It has a spend-based wallet approach, to simplify tracking of usage, purchases, subscriptions etc.
- It also supports quotas and credit limit-based billing, so you can offer your subscribers with the flexibility to select their billing as per their expected resource consumption.
- Your subscribers can get all the basic financial reporting in the form of transactional records and monthly account statements.
- It’s a white label solution and allows for reselling too.
- Dunning and policies for global and account-level suspension, restriction and termination policies based on delayed invoices, dwindling service balances or approaching credit limits can also be set for better user account management.
apiculus brings more power to CloudStack powered clouds and provides regional and domestic service providers a simplified means to track all usage, purchases, subscriptions and configure billing cycles, usage tracking periods, entitlements and quotas to set up subscription models on any digital resource you wish to monetise. It’s fully customizable, automated and helps you stay on top of all account related activities and finances within a single cloud management portal.
For more information on how apiculus can help better manage your CloudStack powered cloud, request a demo here!
Kshitish is a ‘startup expert’ and has been involved with early stage startups, seeing various phases of growth, for more than 15 years. A specialist in Product Management, User Experience, Technology and Product Growth/Strategy, Kshitish is a seasoned entrepreneur with deep expertise in building enterprise products and horizontal/vertical SaaS. Kshitish did his PG in Product Design from NID, Ahmedabad.