Hi,

This email is to introduce and propose project Abacus to the CF community for incubation.

What?

The IBM Bluemix PaaS (based on CloudFoundry) includes a billing and metering component such that users can project and drill down on the costs they have incurred or will incur as they use the system.

Part of this component includes not only APIs that service brokers use to provide usage data, but also, how to aggregate that information, as well as a component to expose the aggregated data into a format (JSON) that can be subsequently consumed by users — this is done via a drill down UI in Bluemix.

Project Abacus is an extracted Open Source Software version (under Apache 2.0 license) of the APIs, usage metering, and aggregation components from the Bluemix feature.

Finally, it’s important to state that project Abacus uses a micro-services architecture and is written in Node.js with CouchDB compatible DBs as datastore and for map/reduce aggregations. Also, all components can actually run as CF apps or be externalized. In Bluemix they run as apps.

In other words, this is a bit different from other CF components, however, we have reviewed Abacus with our colleagues from Pivotal and they also believe it warrants incubation.

When?

Now.

Find the first self-contained release here: https://github.com/jsdelfino/cf-abacus/archive/v0.0.1.tar.gz

There is a comprehensive README that can help you setup and try this first release. The team has included a fake broker that can be used to generate usage data so you can try the whole thing out of the box.

How?

We plan to introduce this as part of the CAB call discussion tomorrow 07/15 and field any questions.

The next step will be to get approval and become an incubation project. Once this is done we will be staffing the project with a team (many from the Bluemix engineers that created it) as well as a PM, and follow the CFF guidelines for new projects.

We are ready to move on this with no delays and we welcome all interested parties to try out the first release and to help us refine the APIs and subsequent releases.

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Best,

IBM CF team

dr.max
ibm cloud labs
silicon valley, ca

Sent from my iPhone