Cloud Cost Tracker

Records expenses for cloud computing resources in an ActiveRecord database.

BETA VERSION - supports EC2 servers, EBS volumes, S3 buckets, and RDS servers

What is it?

The Cloud Cost Tracker periodically polls one or more cloud computing accounts and determines the state of their associated cloud computing "resources": compute instances, disk volumes, stored objects, and so on. Each time an account is polled, a set of ActiveRecord objects (CloudCostTracker::Billing::BillingRecords) is created or updated for each resource, containing the cost for that resource over the period of the BillingRecord.

The software can also attach "billing codes" to any resource, and to its corresponding billing records. These are arbitrary pairs of Strings which can be used to track resources for internal billing. By default, any AWS tags associated with a resource are translated into billing codes, but a framework is also provided for easily writing custom resource coding policies.

Why is it?

The Cloud Cost Tracker was created in response to the fact that Amazon Web Services does not provide per-resource billing information, which makes internal billing very difficult for organizations that make extensive use of AWS. Amazon's proposed solution -- creating, deleting, and cross-authorizing different AWS accounts for each internal billing entity -- is often not workable for organizations that need to perform these operations frequently. As a solution, this gem watches all resources across many accounts, and provides a way to define custom policies for assigning internal billing codes to all recorded expenses.

The Cloud Cost Tracker is intended to be a foundation library, on top of which more complex cloud billing / accounting applications can be built. Custom billing policies for cloud services and resources that are not yet implemented are simple to create, and are discovered automatically. Here are some currently-included default policies:

Installation

Install the Cloud Cost Tracker gem, or list it in your Gemfile.

gem install cloud_cost_tracker [mysql2]

Usage

1) Add the BillingRecords table into your database. Put require 'cloud_cost_tracker/tasks' in your Rakefile, then run:

rake db:migrate:tracker

2) In your Ruby app, require the gem, and set up an ActiveRecord connection. In Rails, the connection is set up for you automatically on startup, but here's an example for a non-Rails app:

require 'cloud_cost_tracker'
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection({
  :adapter => 'mysql2', :database => 'cloud_cost_tracker',
  :pool => 6    # reserve at least one connection per tracked account
})

3) Track all accounts loaded from a YAML file.

tracker = CloudCostTracker::Tracker.new(
  YAML::load(File.read 'accounts.yml'), :logger => Logger.new(STDOUT)
).start

Here are the contents of the example file: config/accounts.example.yml:

AWS EC2 production account:   # The account name - can be anything
  :provider: AWS      # This is the Fog provider Module
  :service: Compute   # Fog service Module. So, EC2 = Fog::Compute::AWS
  :credentials:
    :aws_access_key_id: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    :aws_secret_access_key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
  :delay: 120 # Wait time between successive pollings (in seconds)
  :exclude_resources:
  - :account  # No need to poll for accounts - those are listed here
  - :flavors  # You may or may not want EC2 server types
  - :images   # Takes a while to list all AMIs (works though)
AWS S3 development account:
  :provider: AWS     # S3 = Fog::Storage::AWS
  :service: Storage
  :credentials:
    :aws_access_key_id: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    :aws_secret_access_key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
  :delay: 150
  :exclude_resources:  # Pricing by Bucket is supported, but not by Object
  - :files # This is required for S3 - objects can't be polled directly

The tracker will run asynchronously, with one thread per account. Once the first account has been polled, and its resources coded, CloudCostTracker::Billing::BillingRecords will be generated for each billable resource, and available through ActiveRecord.

Development

This project is still in its early stages, but most of the framework is in place. More resource costs need to be modeled as CloudCostTracker::Billing::ResourceBillingPolicy classes, but the patterns for doing so are now laid out. For the details, see writing-billing-policies, writing-coding-policies, and the API documentation.

Helping hands are appreciated!

Getting started with development

1) Install project dependencies

gem install rake bundler

2) Fetch the project code

git clone https://github.com/benton/cloud_cost_tracker.git
cd cloud_cost_tracker

3) Bundle up and run the tests

bundle && rake