Azure Plan Schedulers for Usage & Billing
- Apostolos Karakaxas
- Panagiotis Papanastasiou
Three important schedulers/jobs are utilized in order to support the Azure Plan subscription invoicing process in our BSS.
Three Main Schedulers
During the period prior to Microsoft's Azure Plan introduction when the legacy Azure Subscriptions were used, we were utilizing Services in order to obtain any kind of Azure data from Microsoft. However, from now on and with the introduction of the Azure Plan from Microsoft, we are utilizing the three following Schedulers instead of Services so as to provide you with the best possible experience during the invoicing process of an Azure Plan subscription.
- Microsoft FXRate - updater job: This first scheduler/job, runs on a daily basis, usually during 05:00 AM (server time zone), and obtains the latest foreign exchange rates from Microsoft, via an API call, and updates our database-stored Microsoft fx rates, for every instance.
- Azure Plan Subscription Consumption's Estimation - obtainer job: After the first job's initiation, the second scheduler/job runs once on a daily basis and gets the current daily cycle of all Azure Plan subscriptions' consumption price estimation from Microsoft, via an API call, and updates the Plan's subscription with the received current estimated price, based on the assigned price list. Therefore, when customers want to check today their Azure Plan subscription's consumption price estimation, they are able to do so.
Microsoft Invoice Generator - obtainer job: After the second job's initiation, the third scheduler/job runs later on a daily basis and monitors, via an API call, whether Microsoft has generated any new invoices in order for the job to obtain them and utilize that data during the next billing run so as to generate the new invoices from our BSS.