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Cloud Management and a Programming Model Case Study
2.
Contract management: Managing service contracts with customers may include the
negotiation, initiation and termination of the contracts.
3.
Inventory Management: This works to register
the service or deals with the service catalog
management where all the service providers are listed.
4.
Accounting and Billing: Activities that come under this head are related to the management
of customers’ billing, like preparing and sending billing statements,
processing received
payments, tracking invoices and so on.
5.
Reporting and Auditing: Auditing user operations and generating necessary reports also
plays a part in business support activities.
6.
Pricing and Rating: Activities under this head include determining the pricing of different
cloud
services after proper analysis, rating customers and plotting pricing rules based on
customer’s profile and so forth.
19.6.2 Provisioning and Configuration
Provisioning and configuration activities can be considered the core of all cloud service
management activities by the providers. Activities like SLA management and/or metering of
services also fall in this section.
1.
Rapid provisioning: This activity takes care of the automatic and rapid deployment of
cloud systems depending on the consumer’s request.
2.
Resource changing: This happens when replacement of existing physical resource
component is required for repairing or up-gradation. Necessary
adjustments in the
configuration are also required when physical nodes are introduced into the cloud.
3.
Monitoring and Reporting: This activity includes the monitoring of cloud operations,
monitoring virtual resources and generating reports about the system performance.
4.
Metering: Metering is one of the basic attributes of cloud computing. Metering of different
types of resources (like storage, bandwidth, processing etc.) at
different levels of cloud
services are managed under this head.
5.
SLA management: This takes care of different aspects of SLA contract made between the
providers and consumers like its definitions, continuous monitoring on the feasibility of
the agreements and ensuring the enforcement of SLAs according to defined policies.
