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OpenStack CloudKitty

OpenStack CloudKitty is an OpenStack project that provides chargeback and rating for cloud resources, enabling metering, pricing, and consumption-based billing in OpenStack environments (cloud cost management / FinOps).

  • Rating engine for OpenStack resource usage, converting metering data into billable items (billing and chargeback).
  • Integration with OpenStack telemetry services for usage collection (cloud observability / metering).
  • Support for multiple rating rules, pricing models, and service types (billing configuration).
  • Exposure of rated data and billing information through APIs and a dashboard plugin in Horizon (API and UI integration).
  • Extensible architecture for plugging in new collectors, rating modules, and output targets (platform extensibility).

More About OpenStack CloudKitty

OpenStack CloudKitty is a rating and chargeback component for OpenStack-based clouds, designed to help operators account for and bill resource consumption in multi-tenant environments (cloud cost management / FinOps). It operates on top of OpenStack services to collect usage data, apply pricing policies, and produce rated outputs that operators can use for internal chargeback, showback, or external billing.

The project focuses on the problem of translating raw infrastructure metrics into financial or quota-related values that enterprises can use in their operational and commercial processes (billing and chargeback). CloudKitty consumes usage data from OpenStack telemetry services and other data sources, processes this data through configurable rating rules, and stores the resulting rated records. This enables operators to establish pricing schemes across resources such as compute, storage, and network services offered in an OpenStack cloud.

Key capabilities include a rating engine that supports multiple rating modules and pricing strategies (billing configuration). Administrators can define rules based on resource type, usage volume, or other criteria, and have CloudKitty compute costs over defined time periods. The project includes collectors that interface with telemetry and other systems to ingest metrics (cloud observability / metering), and it exposes the processed data through Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs (API services) for integration with external billing, accounting, or reporting tools.

CloudKitty provides integration with the OpenStack Horizon dashboard via a dedicated plugin (UI integration). This enables operators and, in some deployments, tenants to view rated usage, estimated costs, and reports through a web interface. The platform stores data in a backend database, which can then serve as a source for downstream financial systems or analytics tools in enterprise settings (data management).

The architecture is modular and extensible, with support for pluggable collectors, rating modules, and output backends (platform extensibility). This allows organizations to adapt CloudKitty to different metering systems, custom pricing logic, or integration requirements. It can be deployed as part of a broader OpenStack control plane, working alongside core services such as compute, block storage, object storage, and networking to provide a consumption-based economic layer on top of technical resource usage.

In enterprise and institutional environments, CloudKitty is used to implement showback and chargeback models for private, public, or community clouds built on OpenStack (cloud governance). Operators can segment costs per tenant, project, or service, enabling more granular accountability and budget management. Within a technical taxonomy, CloudKitty fits into categories such as billing and chargeback, cloud cost management, and OpenStack service add-ons, providing financial and accounting capabilities over OpenStack infrastructure services.