The Abacus usage metering and aggregation service.
Abacus provides usage metering and aggregation for Cloud Foundry (CF) services. It is implemented as a set of REST micro-services that collect usage data, apply metering formulas, and aggregate usage at several levels within a Cloud Foundry organization.
Abacus is implemented in Node.js and the different micro-services can run as CF apps.
This diagram shows the main Abacus services and their role in the processing of usage data. It also shows the services you can deploy around Abacus to integrate it into your Cloud platform.
Abacus provides a REST API allowing Cloud service providers to submit usage data, and a REST API allowing usage dashboards, and billing systems to retrieve usage reports. The Abacus REST API is described in doc/api.md.
For presentations related to CF-Abacus, see the presentations page.
The Abacus FAQ can be found in doc/faq.md.
Abacus requires Node.js >= 6.10.0 and Npm >= 3.10.10.
cd cf-abacus
# Bootstrap the build environment
# install the Node.js module dependencies and run the tests
npm run build
cd cf-abacus
# Run eslint on the Abacus modules
npm run lint
# Run the tests
npm test
For a list of all available tests check doc/tests.md.
Abacus runs as a set of applications deployed to Cloud Foundry. Each application is configured to run in multiple instances for availability and performance. Service usage data is stored in CouchDB databases.
The following steps assume a local Cloud Foundry deployment created using Bosh-lite, running on the default local IP assigned by the Bosh-lite CF installation script, and have been tested on CF v226.4. Please adjust to your particular Cloud Foundry deployment environment.
cd cf-abacus
# Point CF CLI to your local Cloud Foundry deployment and
# create a CF security group for the Abacus apps
bin/cfsetup
# Run cf push on the Abacus apps to deploy them to Cloud Foundry
npm run cfpush
# Check the state of the Abacus apps
cf apps
# You should see something like this
Getting apps in org <your organization> / space <your space>...
OK
name requested state instances memory disk urls
abacus-usage-collector started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-usage-collector.both-lite.com
abacus-usage-meter started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-usage-meter.both-lite.com
abacus-usage-accumulator started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-usage-accumulator.both-lite.com
abacus-usage-aggregator started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-usage-aggregator.both-lite.com
abacus-usage-reporting started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-usage-reporting.both-lite.com
abacus-provisioning-plugin started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-provisioning-plugin.both-lite.com
abacus-account-plugin started 1/1 512M 512M abacus-account-plugin.both-lite.com
abacus-pouchserver started 1/1 1G 512M abacus-pouchserver.both-lite.com
The Abacus demo runs a simple test program that simulates the submission of usage by a Cloud service provider, then gets a daily report for the usage aggregated within a Cloud Foundry organization.
The demo data is stored in a small in-memory PouchDB test database so the demo is self-contained and you don't need to set up a real CouchDB database just to run it.
Once the Abacus apps are running on your Cloud Foundry deployment, do this:
cd cf-abacus
# Run the demo script
npm run demo -- \
--collector https://abacus-usage-collector.both-lite.com \
--reporting https://abacus-usage-reporting.both-lite.com
# You should see usage being submitted and a usage report for the demo organization
The Abacus apps can also run on your local host in a shell environment outside of Cloud Foundry, like this:
cd cf-abacus
# Start the Abacus apps
npm start
# Wait a bit until all the apps have started
# Run the demo script
npm run demo
# Stop everything
npm stop
Abacus comes with a CF bridge that acts as a resource provider for Cloud Foundry app runtime usage, reads Cloud Foundry app usage events using Cloud Controller API and reports usage to the Abacus usage collector.
In the end the Abacus CF bridge enables you to see runtime usage reports for the apps running on your Cloud Foundry instance. In order to start the CF bridge follow its README.
You can use Concourse pipelines to test, deploy and monitor Abacus.
The Abacus source tree is organized as follows:
bin/ - Start, stop, demo and cf push scripts
demo/ - Demo apps
client - demo program that posts usage and gets a report
doc/ - API documentation
lib/ - Abacus modules
metering/ - Metering services
collector - receives and collects service usage data
meter - applies metering formulas to usage data
aggregation/ - Aggregation services
accumulator - accumulates usage over time and applies
pricing to accumulated usage
aggregator - aggregates usage within an organization and applies
pricing to aggregated usage
reporting - returns usage reports
cf/ - CF platform integration
bridge - collects CF app usage data
renewer - carries over usage from previous month
config/ - Usage formula and pricing configuration
utils/ - Utility modules used by the above
plugins/ - Plugins for provisioning and account services
test/ - End to end tests
perf/ - Performance tests
tools/ - Build tools
etc/ - Misc build scripts
concourse/ - Concourse pipelines
As shown in the above Layout section, Abacus consists of a number of Node.js modules under the lib directory.
When developing on Abacus you may want to quickly iterate through changes to a single module, and run the tests only for that module rather than rebuilding the whole project each time.
Here are the steps most of us follow when we work on a single module, using the collector module as an example.
First, bootstrap your Abacus development environment:
cd cf-abacus
# Setup the base Node.js tools and dependencies used by the Abacus build
npm run bootstrap
Then install your module's dependencies as usual with npm:
cd cf-abacus/lib/metering/collector
npm install
At this point your development cycle boils down to:
cd cf-abacus/lib/metering/collector
# Run ESLint on your code and run the module's unit tests
npm test
To run the collector app you can do this:
cd cf-abacus/lib/metering/collector
npm start
To push the app to your Cloud Foundry instance, do this:
cd cf-abacus/lib/metering/collector
npm run cfpush
Finally, to rebuild everything once you're happy with your module:
cd cf-abacus
# Important to do at this point as the next step does a git clean
git add <your changes>
# Does a git clean to make sure the build starts fresh
npm run clean
# Build and unit test all the modules
npm run build
# Or to run what our Travis-CI build runs, including integration tests
npm run cibuild