Product Management
CPBM natively bills users for usage accrued by an account. Ideally this usage accrual is scoped by user (if the service supports that notion) or at the account level. In order to support this, a connector has to provide sufficient information to CPBM for it to be able to do the following actions:
- Appropriate selection of resource type components which make up the information that needs to be specified for provisioning a resource
- Appropriate input of optional provisioning time configuration information for each resource that's provisioned.
- Ability to identify and display prices for resources that are being provisioned
- Ability to filter resource components based on domain specific filters (in the case of resource component options being large or pricing being different)
- Ability to segregate usage information into appropriate pricing buckets
- Ability to describe technical constraints with respect to provisioning (such as once per account only or require X to be provisioned before Y can be provisioned etc)
- Ability to describe 'add-on' relationships where a resource is provisioned as an 'add-on' to an existing resource.
Before delving into the details of the metadata and SPI implementations that needs to be provided by a connector to achieve the above, it is useful to understand a little bit about how CPBM provisions and bills for resources consumed by a customer. We will discuss the CPBM product management model in the following section.
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