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Cloud Foundry Abacus

Cloud Foundry Abacus is an open-source usage metering and aggregation service designed to collect, process, and aggregate usage data for Cloud Foundry-based platform services (observability / billing and metering).

  • Usage collection, normalization, and metering for Cloud Foundry platform services (billing and metering).
  • Aggregation of usage data across applications, organizations, and time windows (analytics / reporting).
  • Pipeline-style processing of metering events using modular microservices (stream processing).
  • Integration with Cloud Foundry service brokers and platform components to report and rate service consumption (platform integration).
  • Extensible architecture for defining custom metering and aggregation logic through configuration and plug-in components (extensibility / customization).

More About Cloud Foundry Abacus

Cloud Foundry Abacus is an open-source usage metering and aggregation project from the Cloud Foundry ecosystem, designed to collect and process usage data generated by applications and services running on a Cloud Foundry platform (billing and metering). It addresses the problem of consistently measuring service consumption across distributed components so that platform operators and service providers can build charging, accounting, and reporting workflows on top of Cloud Foundry.

Abacus focuses on end-to-end usage processing, starting with collection of raw usage events emitted by Cloud Foundry services and applications (observability / telemetry). These events are normalized into a common format and then passed through a sequence of microservices that meter, aggregate, and store usage metrics over defined time periods such as hours, days, or months (stream processing). The architecture is structured as a processing pipeline, where each stage applies a clear function, such as validation, deduplication, accumulation, or aggregation.

The project is architected as a set of Node.js-based microservices that communicate via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and can be deployed on Cloud Foundry itself (cloud-native application platform). Each service in the pipeline handles a discrete responsibility, including usage submission APIs, metering logic, aggregation by plan or organization, and storage of computed usage documents (microservices architecture). This design allows operators to scale or adjust individual components, for example increasing capacity for ingestion or aggregation services as usage volume grows.

In enterprise environments, Abacus is used as a building block for metering and, where desired, rating scenarios, enabling providers to track how much of a given service plan, Application Programming Interface (API), or resource is consumed by an application, space, or organization (billing support). It integrates with Cloud Foundry’s service broker model so that service instances can report their usage metrics in a standard way. Usage data can then be exported or consumed by billing, chargeback, or business intelligence systems (enterprise integration).

Cloud Foundry Abacus exposes programmable configuration for defining metering and aggregation rules, including how units are counted, how they accumulate over time, and how different dimensions such as plan, organization, or region are represented (policy configuration). This enables custom metering models that reflect the pricing or accounting structures used by a given provider. Because it operates at the data-processing layer, Abacus fits into directories under categories such as cloud platform metering, usage analytics, and billing enablement for Cloud Foundry-based services.