Billing & Resource Units¶

Cloud billing is an accounting of all the metered usage over a given month. Typically, organizations have a single bill for resources consumed every month.

Why resource consumption is important?¶

We define consumption as an event of using resources provided by whitesky.cloud NV.

Since small inefficiencies can add up quickly when you scale, it is important to understand the nature of your consumption and to use efficient ways to track it. Here we explain the main principles behind resource usage calculation and billing at whitesky.cloud NV to help our customers to optimize their expenses.

To understand cloud consumption, it helps to understand different resource types.

Resource unit types¶

When you deploy resources in whitesky.cloud NV you typically end up consuming more than one type of consumption units. From the billing perspective we divide units in two types:

Consumption-based units: Pay as you go. For example, network usage is paid per amount of network transactions and s3 storage is paid for the exact amount of storage that is occupied in the object storage.
Allocation-based units: These units are paid for allocation, regardless of the actual load. For example, creating a virtual disk of 10 GiB will result in 10 GiB of storage consumption, regardless on the content on the disk. The same logic applies to the memory and vCPUs.

Tip

Invoices normalise consumption to the month's actual number of days. The 30-day figure applies to the spendings/BI view. All the resources are metered hourly.

Consumption units¶

The total consumption of your resources is calculated as a composition of the following consumption types

Unit	Unit Type	Description
Virtual CPU unit (VCU)	Allocation	1 VCU is the equivalent of using 1 unpinned virtual CPU for a month.
Memory unit (MU)	Allocation	1 MU is the equivalent of using 1024MiB of memory for a month.
Storage unit (SU)	Allocation	1 SU is the equivalent of using 1TB of disk storage for a month.
Object unit (OU)	Consumption	1 OU is the equivalent of using 1TB of objectspace storage for a month.
Transaction unit (TU)	Allocation	400 allocated IOPS (input/output operations per second).
Public IP Address unit (PIU)	Allocation	1 assigned public IP Address is an equivalent of using 1 PIU.
Windows unit (WU)	Allocation	Charged for all VMs running Windows OS. 1 WU is the equivalent of running a VM with Windows OS with 2 vCPU and 4 GiB of memory over a month. The WU count is derived from an internal compute unit (CU), calculated per VM as `CU = max(memory in GB / 4, vcpus / 2)`. CU is not billed on its own and is not shown as a separate line item — it exists only to determine the number of WUs.
Network unit (NU)	Consumption	Metered based on the total bandwidth consumed. 1 NU is the equivalent of consuming 1TB of traffic from and towards the virtual firewall or the external IP address on your VMs.
Virtual Graphics processing Unit (VGU)	Allocation	1 VGU is the equivalent of using 1 virtual GPU for a month.
Flash Storage Unit (FSU)	Allocation	1 FSU is the equivalent of using 1 TB of flash memory configured on a disk attached to a running VM for a period of one month.

Storage unit (SU) multiplier¶

Storage is billed in storage units (SU), but the rate is not the same for every storage class. Each storage class has an SU multiplier that scales how many storage units a disk is billed for. The multiplier changes the billed storage only — it does not change the capacity a disk provides. A 100 GiB disk on a class with a multiplier of 2.0 still holds 100 GiB, but is billed as if it were 200 GiB of storage.

The storage part of a disk's cost is calculated as:

storage cost = (disk size in GB / 1000) × SU price × SU multiplier

(1 SU = 1 TB, hence the division by 1000.)

The multiplier defaults to 1.0 and must be greater than 0.
It is configured per storage class by your platform operator. You can see it as the SU multiplier column under Locations → Storage Classes, and as Storage unit multiplier in the storage-class details shown when you create a disk or virtual machine.
Physical Storage disks are billed as flash storage (FSU) rather than SU, so the SU multiplier does not apply to them.
If a disk has no storage class specified, it uses the default class — whitesky.cloud SDS — which has a multiplier of 1.0, so no scaling is applied.

Factors affect consumption on your VM¶

The amount of vCPUs
The amount of memory
The total amount of disk storage
Pinning vCPU to a physical CPU. Consumption of 1 pinned vCPU over a month results in consumption equivalent to 4 VCU units.
IOPS of the disks
The total amount of traffic
Host operating system. For example, running Windows OS will result in extra charges for running the VM itself, plus costs for the licenses reported to the Windows licensing software.
Additional licensed software. All VMs in our platform are daily scanned for the Windows software installed. Beware that when you are using software that is subject to licensing, extra charges may apply. To see the software that was detected on your VMs navigate to Software licenses in the navigation drawer
Switching off unused VMs. When the VM is switched off and has status HALTED, it is no longer charged for memory (MU), virtual CPU (VCU) or Windows (WU) units, since a halted VM does not claim memory or vCPUs. It is still charged for storage (SU), IOPS (TU), attached GPU (VGU), public IP (PIU) and flash storage (FSU).

Example

VM resources: 2 unpinned vCPU, 4096 MB memory and 100GiB total disk storage, Windows OS installed. Consumption over a month: 2VCU, 4MU and 0.1SU, 1WU. (1 SU = 1 TB, so 100 GiB ≈ 0.1 SU)