openstack team mailing list archive

["Brian Lamar" <brian.lamar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Would a less structured approach work to make billing/reporting more flexible for the community? I was thinking something along the lines of tags. With an arbitrary set of tags, instances could have a tag saying they belong to a certain organisation and/or an enterprise. 

Reports could be generated collecting the number of instances with a specific tag and it would allow for potentially arbitrary billing patterns. 

I'll admit to being surprised at myself advocating for arbitrary tags, but having worked on billing systems in the past...the last thing I'd like is for a rigid hierarchy to be put in, because right after it's done it's inevitable that another part of the company wants to change how customers are billed.

B

-----Original Message-----
From: "Devin Carlen" <devin.carlen@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 3, 2011 3:02pm
To: "Monsyne Dragon" <mdragon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Openstack] Pondering multi-tenant needs in nova.

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We were just talking about this the other day.  We definitely need some kind of further hierarchy.  I think a typical kind of use case for multi-tenant could be something like:

Enterprise contains Organizations

Organizations contain Organizations and Projects

Projects contain Instances, etc.


In this structure enterprise is just a top level organization.  If we structure it this way it would make metering and billing pretty simple.



 


On Feb 2, 2011, at 5:37 PM, Monsyne Dragon wrote:

> I am sorting out some possible implementations for the multi-tenant-accounting blueprint, and the related system-usage-records bp,
> and I just wanted to run this by anyone interested in such matters.
> 
> Basically, for multitenant purposes we need to introduce the concept of an 'account' in nova, representing a customer,  that basically acts as a label for a group of resources (instances, etc), and for access control (i.e customer a cannot mess w/ customer b's stuff)
> 
> There was some confusion on how best to implement this, in relation to nova's project concept.  Projects are kind of like what we want an account to be, but there are some associations (like one project per network) which are not valid for our flat networking setup.  I am kind of straw-polling on which is better here:
> 
> The options are:
> 1) Create a new 'account' concept in nova,  with an account basically being a subgroup of a project (providers would use a single, default project, with additional projects added if needed for separate brands, or resellers, etc), add in access control per account as well as project, and make sure apis/auth specify account appropriately,  have some way for a default account to used (per project) so account doesn't get in the way for non-multitenant users.
> 
> 2) having account == nova's "project", and changing the network associations, etc so projects can support our model (as well as current models).  Support for associating accounts (projects) together for resellers, etc would either be delegated outside of nova or added later (it's not a current requirement).
> 
> In either case, accounts would be identified by name, which would  be an opaque string an outside system/person would assign, and could structure to their needs (ie. for associating accounts with common prefixes, etc)
> 
> -- 
> 
> --
>    -Monsyne Dragon
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