Quota Plugin

Quota service, while allowing for scalability, will make sure that the cloud is not exploited by attacks, careless use and program errors. To address this problem, employ the quota-enforcement service that allows resource usage within certain bounds as defined by policies and available quotas for various entities. Quota service extends the functionality of usage server to provide a measurement for the resources used by the accounts and domains using a common unit referred to as cloud currency in this document. It can be configured to ensure that your usage won’t exceed the budget allocated to accounts/domain in cloud currency. It will let user know how much of the cloud resources he is using. It will help the cloud admins, if they want, to ensure that a user does not go beyond his allocated quota. Per usage cycle if an account is found to be exceeding its quota then it is locked. Locking an account means that it will not be able to initiate a new resource allocation request, whether it is more storage or an additional ip. To unlock an account you need to add more credit to it. In case you want the locking to be disabled on global or on account scope those provisions are also provided. Needless to say quota service as well as any action on the account is configurable.

Enabling the Quota Service

Before installing and configuring the quota service you need to make sure that the Usage Server has been installed. This requires extra steps beyond just installing the CloudStack software. See Installing the Usage Server (Optional) in the Advanced Installation Guide.

1. enable.usage.server: Set to true to enable usage server.

The quota plugin is disabled by default. To enable it goto Global Settings and set the following global configuration to true:

1. quota.enable.service

By default Quota service does not lock the accounts that have exceeded the quota usage. To enable quota service to lock accounts set the following global configuration to true:

1. quota.enable.enforcement

The other configurations that are there for quota service are as:

1. quota.currency.symbol : The symbol that is used before any currency figure in various quota forms and reports.
2. quota.usage.smtp.host: Quota SMTP host for sending quota alerts.
3. quota.usage.smtp.port: Quota SMTP port.
4. quota.usage.smtp.user: Quota SMTP user.
5. quota.usage.smtp.password: Quota SMTP password.
6. quota.usage.smtp.sender: Quota SMTP alert sender email address.
7. quota.usage.smtp.useAuth: If true, use secure SMTP authentication when sending emails.
8. quota.usage.smtp.connection.timeout: Quota SMTP server connection timeout duration.

There are several configuration variables that are inherited from usage server, these are listed below:

1. usage.aggregation.timezone

All these are described in details in Usage Server documentation.

Restart the Management Server and the Usage Server to enable the set configuration values.

service cloudstack-management restart
service cloudstack-usage restart

Once the quota service is running it will calculate the quota balance for each account. The quota usage is calculated as per the quota tariff provided by the site administrator.

Quota Tariff

The following table shows all quota types for which you can specify tariff.

The quota tariff can be listed using listQuotaTariff API.

quotaTariff: Lists all quota tariff plans

The tariff for each of the above can be set by using the updateQuotaTariff API.

Quota Credits

The quota credit (quotaCredit) API lets you add or remove quota currency credits to an account. With this API you can also control the quota enforcement policy at account level. This will enable you to have some accounts where the quota policy is not enforced. The overall quota enforcement is controlled by the quota.enable.enforcement global setting.

In addition to above the quota API lets you can fine tune the alert generation by specifying the quota threshold for each account. If not explictly stated, the threshold is taken as 80% of the last deposit.

Quota Balance

Quota balance API states the start balance and end balance(optional) from a start date to end date (optional).

Quota Statement

Quota statement for a period consist of the quota usage under various quota types for the given period from a start date to an end date.

Quota Monthly Statement

Quota service emails the monthly quota statement for the last month at the beginning of each month. For this service to work properly you need to ensure that the usage server is running.

Quota Alert Management

Quota module also provides APIs to customize various email templates that are used to alert account owners about quota going down below threshold and quota getting over.

All the above functionality is also available via quota UI plugin.