Public cloud price list synchronization

This document describes how you can onboard price lists from public cloud providers such as Amazon AWS and Azure ARM and use them in flexible reseller pricing models with CSP discounts and mark ups

Abiquo 4.6 can obtain pricing details from public cloud providers. The platform obtains and synchronizes the prices of hardware profiles for Linux instances with no pre-installed software.

Requirements

The platform will check that the enterprise has access to the appropriate regions and that it has a valid pricing model for the region. The platform will not retrieve hardware profile prices if the enterprise does not have pricing credentials.

Pricing credentials

There is a new Pricing tab to enter a separate set of public cloud credentials for pricing, and the option to use the same public cloud credentials that manage virtual resources. The platform obtains prices for Linux instances. In AWS, this feature will only work with a currency value of US Dollars, irrespective of the pricing model currency. Therefore, it is recommended that customers use US Dollars as the currency for Amazon regions in their pricing model.

The pricing credentials must have privileges to access the pricing data in the provider via API.

For example, in Amazon the credentials may be the same ones that access virtual resources but in any case, the IAM user will require AWSPriceListServiceFullAccess.
For Azure, the pricing credentials for standard accounts will differ from the credentials to manage virtual resources. They will have the following formats, depending on the account type:
- Standard account: subscription-id#app-id#tenant-id#offer-durable-id
- CSP: user#client-id#csp-authenticator-uri

If you have a tenant hierarchy, including scopes with reseller or key node enterprises, the platform finds valid credentials with the priority:

Own enterprise pricing credentials
Key Node enterprise pricing credentials
Reseller enterprise pricing credentials
Own enterprise public cloud credentials

Discounts and price factors for resellers and key nodes

When your tenant hierarchy contains resellers and key nodes, you may add enterprise properties to apply discounts and price factors, with the following formula:

(provider_price / (1 - discount)) * price_factor

The properties must use the following format:

provider_type.to_lower_case + property_suffix

For example for CSP and reseller:

azurecompute-arm_discount=0.2
amazon_discount=0

For example for customer of CSP and reseller:

azurecompute-arm_price_factor=1.25
amazon_price_factor=1.17

It is also possible to configure the suffix of these properties. See Abiquo configuration properties#enterprise.

The platform will search for discount and price factor properties with the priority:

Key node enterprise properties.
Reseller enterprise properties.
Default values that won't modify the original price (0 for discount and 1 for price factor)

Note that CSP Accounts already return the price with the discount applied, so the plugin does not apply it again.

Price list synchronization frequency

When you enter the pricing credentials, the platform will retrieve hardware profile prices from the provider. You can display hardware profile prices in the pricing model. By default the platform will refresh hardware profile prices every 24 hours and the administrator may configure this interval for the platform. See Abiquo configuration properties#pricing.