Chapter 5. Billing and Procurement
Key topics in this chapter:
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Capital versus operational expenses
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Concerns with the “build it and they will come” model
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Ordering cloud services, procurement challenges in an automated service catalog
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Fixed price XaaS versus variable scaling and pricing
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Metering versus allocated pricing models
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Cloud billing versus accounting and invoicing systems
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Usage forecasting
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Legal and contract agreements
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Top cloud providers
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Billing and procurement best practices
Cloud services represent not only a new style of delivering IT services, but also a change in the way they are procured, resource usage is measured, billing is carried out, and the way organizations maintain budgets. In this chapter, I focus on lessons learned and best practices relating to the resource tracking, billing, contract terms, and public cloud vendor guidance. This chapter covers topics relating to both a private enterprise cloud and also procuring public cloud services as many organizations consider or end up with a combination of both cloud models.
Because some large organizations serve as a central IT for other departments or peer agencies, this would put central IT into a cloud service brokering role—making these other departments or agencies essentially “customers,” which is a term that will sometimes be used in this chapter. You can read a full description of cloud brokering in Chapter 8.
Capital Versus Operational Expenses
We begin this chapter with a brief ...