How We Built a Metering & Chargeback System to Incentivize Higher Resource Utilization
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 26/10/2016

How We Built a Metering & Chargeback System to Incentivize Higher Resource Utilization of Twitter Infrastructure - Michael Benedict & Vinu Charanya, Twitter

Twitter is powered by thousands of Applications that run on our internal Cloud platform, a suite of multi-tenant platform services that offer Compute, Storage, Messaging, Monitoring, etc as a service. These platforms have thousands of tenants and run atop hundreds of thousands of servers, across multiple zones. This scale makes it difficult to evaluate resource utilization, cost & efficiency across platforms in a canonical way. 
We share how we built a platform agnostic metering & chargeback infrastructure for Twitter's complex platform topology. We use our Compute platform (powered by Apache Aurora/Mesos) as a case-study to show how both the platform owner and users of the platform used it to not only measure resource utilization & cost (across private/public Cloud in a canonical way) but also improve overall resource utilization & drive the cost-per-core down leading to huge savings.

About Micheal Benedict

Micheal Benedict leads Product Management for Twitter's Cloud Platform. He and his team are building the next generation compute infrastructure that spans private and public clouds. Previously, he was a Software Engineer at Twitter building Observability. Before joining Twitter, Micheal was a Research Assistant at University at Buffalo’s Blue Labs and built PhoneLab: World’s Largest Smartphone Experimentation Test Bed. Micheal has a M.S in Computer Science from University at Buffalo.

About Vinu Charanya
Software Enginner, Twitter