Jazoon ‘09: Activity Based Costing and the Cloud

Mike over at Canoo has a write-up of the talk I gave today at the Jazoon 09 conference on applying activity based costing in the cloud. I understand some of his concerns but I hope he will see that the model itself has application in many areas not all cost related (at least not directly) including performance and capacity management.

I am delighted he is excited (“it’s certainly an incredibly powerful idea”) about the possibility of our OpenCore Probes API becoming a standard which we can all expect to be available in the runtime and which can be extended by cloud or runtime vendors via the registration of their own custom meters.

I would like to add that metering does not necessarily imply that every activity has to be costed. Metering is a powerful and scalable way of analyzing the resource usage of a software without suffering from the obvious scalability and performance problems of call or path trace tools. Activity analysis can be the sole purpose of the data collected and the model generated. During the demo I showed how you can even create a meter based on the frequency or resource usage of another metered activity. This is what so cool about our design and implementation – you can model the execution of a block code as an activity or meter or both.

Activity based metering (ABM) is an incredibly important source of information on behavioral patterns of users which can in fact increase development budgets in areas that have higher profit margins or are used much more frequently (and hopefully appreciated) by clients. More and more of our daily activities are mirrored in the execution of software in todays web and business applications. Threads are our delegates (agents) acting on our behalf.

It is also extremely important when you are a Web 2.0 startup with a growing user base and no clue of what business model can be applied that will eventually offset operational costs that will likely to continue to grow in the future.

Next time I intend ending the session with a clip from the Matrix showing our life streams (threads/calls) flowing down the panel with a little William (or Smith) assuming control of one or more threads temporarily.