Turning system accounting data into money

[David Brodbeck]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Christopher J. Ruwe <cjr at cruwe.de> wrote:
> So, systems that do what you want (and customers who want to pay on a per use basis) must be around for quite some time.

Yeah, this was the normal way of doing things for many years on
"large" systems, back when a "large system" was a multiuser UNIX box
the size of a refrigerator.  For a long time it went away, as computer
time got "too cheap to meter," so a lot of the accounting tools that
exist in UNIX are a bit foreign to modern admins.

We're seeing a bit of a resurgence of the pay-for-usage model with
services like Amazon EC2.