Measured service is a term that IT professionals apply to cloud computing. This is a reference to services where the cloud provider measures or monitors the provision of services for various reasons, including billing, effective use of resources, or overall predictive planning.
The idea of measured service is one of five components of a definition of cloud computing supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST. These five principles support a higher-level definition of cloud services and describe how they are typically designed. Other aspects of this definition include the terms ‘rapid elasticity’ and ‘Resource pooling,’ which cover different kinds of resource allocation. There’s also ‘On-demand self-service,’ which refers to more automated service changes, and ‘Broad network access,’ which refers to the overall footprint and capabilities of cloud systems.
Measured Service Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.
Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.
Metered services (also called pay-per-use) is any type of payment structure in which a customer has access to potentially unlimited resources but only pays for what they actually use. With utility computing, for example, a company can purchase computing resources to match fluctuating needs.
Furthermore, what are the four types of cloud computing services? Cloud computing services fall into 4 categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and FaaS (functions as a service).
Measuring the effectiveness of cloud adoption:
- Effectiveness of cloud adoption is rarely assessed.
- No established industry-standard metrics for measuring cloud effectiveness.
- Cloud adoption context significantly differs between organizations.
- Different stakeholders have different perceptions of cloud adoption.
- Most cloud metrics aim to measure cloud value in IT terms not in business terms.
- Measurement data concerning cloud adoption often does not exist within the organization.
- Objectives of cloud adoption change during the implementation path.
- Most employees belonging to an organization do not know about the cloud initiative.
Measuring cloud metrics are necessary to:
- Switch away from a CapEx intensive model to a subscription model
- Adopt a utility model and on-demand consumption vs. a one-time investment
- Free up resources from mundane technological activities to roles that contribute more value to the business
- Reduce TCO
- Improve ability to seize new business opportunities
- Improve business agility
The cloud adoption success measurement should:
- Increase in revenue margin
- Improve ROI
- Improve quality of user experience
- Improve elastic scaling cost
- Improve level of automation
- Improve transaction latency and throughput
- Increase open source adoption