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About Billing Infrastructure

CSPs provide resource usage and cost reports to customers at set intervals. Parallel Works refers to this as the true cost data. Each CSP's cost export feature ultilizes unique cloud infrastructure and has a unique data format. ACTIVATE can provision the necessary infrastructure to enable CSP billing exports on each cloud, please see Configuring Billing Infrastructure for more details.

Alternatively, organizations may manually enable CSP billing data exports by following steps for each CSP they will use with ACTIVATE.

Once data exports are configured, ACTIVATE pulls, formats, and stores true cost data from each CSP. ACTIVATE users and organization administrators can see true cost data on the cost dashboard (documention link coming soon), which is a convenient one-stop page for users to track their usage across all CSPs without having to refer to each CSP's cost management console.

Below, you can find specific details about the implementation of the billing infrastructure for each CSP.

AWS Billing Infrastructure​

Deploying billing infrastructure provisions the following on AWS:

  • Cost Usage Report: exports AWS cost data periodically
  • S3 Bucket: stores exported AWS cost data

The schematic below shows how ACTIVATE communicates with AWS Cloud after the billing infrastructure is created.

A diagram of AWS billing data being sent to ACTIVATE.

Azure Billing Infrastructure​

Deploying billing infrastructure provisions the following on Azure:

  • Cost Export: exports Azure cost data daily
  • Billing Resource Group: groups the storage account and container
  • Storage Account: an account to contain the blob storage container
  • Blob Container: stores exported Azure cost data
  • Cost Management Export Provider: registers the necessary provider for cost export (not included in the diagram)

The schematic below shows how ACTIVATE communicates with Azure Cloud after the billing infrastructure is created.

A diagram of Azure billing data being sent to ACTIVATE.

Google Billing Infrastructure​

Deploying billing infrastructure provisions the following on Google:

  • BigQuery Dataset: stores exported Google cost data
  • BigQuery Data Transfer API: enables the necessary API to export data to BigQuery (not included in the diagram)

The schematic below shows how ACTIVATE communicates with Google Cloud after the billing infrastructure is created.

A diagram of Google billing data being sent to ACTIVATE.