Some highlights and key points from the discussion include:
With the advent of cloud technology, pricing can always be broken down to “costs plus some markup.” Elastic back-end resources (via the cloud) allows you to always align front-end usage with back-end consumption.
Usage-based pricing drives operational efficiency and is more fair to end-users.
Metering system must be accurate. This means records must be guaranteed to be deduplicated and idempotent. The system must be durable and available according to enterprise cloud platform standards.
You can afford to miss monitoring or logging data but not metering data as metering data is used for billing.
Usage data is the lifeblood of a company - not just for pricing and billing, but to drive all areas of the business to drive operational efficiencies, such as product development, customer-facing functions, finance, and accounting.
The metering service must handle ingestion, aggregation, persistence, and visualization - ideally in real time.
Metering service must be decoupled (yet integrated) from Pricing and Billing. Metering is the platform that pricing and billing applications leverage.
You cannot back into Metering from Pricing and Billing. You should implement metering first and leverage that usage data to inform pricing plan creation and iteration.
Meter everything - your pricing meters should be a subset of the customer-facing meters that track usage and action within your application or service. Likewise, you should meter the back-end as well to track the costs and resource consumption associated with customers’ usage. These cost meters should be a subset of your internal-facing meters.
