HACKER Q&A
📣 sideshowb

Framework to bill customers for cloud compute costs?


I'm not clear whether this thing exists, but essentially, I have a useful algorithm for a specific niche market. I would like to implement it on a highly parallel cloud compute platform (think running a job on 1000+ nodes at once, possibly though not necessarily with mapreduce). And I would like to charge customers for using this algorithm.

Is there an existing framework that handles all the necessary billing - ideally with customers directly liable to the compute provider, to limit my own liability, with a percentage added for my own fees?

I appreciate on AWS you can release an EC2 image which people can use on their own instances while you charge an hourly licensing fee. Ideally I'd be looking for something easier on the customer, though.


  👤 verdverm Accepted Answer ✓
There is nothing open source at the moment, many companies build something like this, welcome to the world of product development!

Thing is, if you have a data product, get ready to deploy to their account. They aren't going to ship that data to you, too most cost and risk. You can start with a SaaS offering, 8x markup, then transition them to enterprise license that is more seat / time based than resource consumption.