Want VM price estimates at build time in Aria Automation, here's how you do it! Once Aria Automation has been deployed you'll first want to configure the Integration with Aria Operations, which can be found in Service Broker - Infrastructure - Connections - Integrations - ADD INTEGRATION. This is a requirement, as Operations is doing the actual calculations.
Be sure to enable the Display pricing information slider, which will share pricing information in Assembler and Service Broker. You can always use the SYNC PRICES button here to manually sync prices between Automation and Operations as well, otherwise they sync automatically every 6 hours, details can be found here.
The Operations integration creates a Default Pricing Card in Assembler - Infrastructure - Configure - Pricing Cards.
SETTINGS allows you to assign prices to Automation Projects or Cloud Zones, toggle pricing displays, and sync prices with Operations. You also have the option to create price cards for different Projects via the NEW button. Let's explore the Default Pricing card created by the Operations integration.
The Summary tab provides the currency (which is set in Operations) and gives you the ability to set a default for unassigned Automation Projects. It also provides an Overview of what's set in the Pricing tab.
There are two options available in the Pricing tab: Cost and Rate. Documentation can be found here, but in summary Cost will pull Costs from Operations (base rates for vCPU, Memory, Disk, and Daily Charges allocated) and apply a factor to them. Rate will use base rates provided within Automation.
You can also provide Guest OS prices, Tags, Custom Properties, and Overall Charges, like one time and recurring fees.
So, in summary we have configured the following:
Let's confirm these rates are being used by our Automation price engine by performing a Daily Price Estimate on a potential VM. We'll deploy a Large Windows 2012 R2 VM, here's the Cloud Template.
This VM will have 8 vCPU, 16GB Memory, 80GB Disk (in addition to the boot disk which is 140 GB).
Based on our Pricing card we should have the following for a price at build time.
vCPU: 8 vCPU x $5/vCPU/day = $40 daily for vCPU
Memory: 16GB RAM x $15/GB/day = $160 daily for Memory
Disk
140GB boot disk x $1/GB/day = $140 daily for disk
80GB additional disk x $1/day = $80 daily for disk
Daily recurring charge: $19 daily
I go to deploy my VM and CALCULATE is at the bottom below Daily Price Estimate.
Select CALCULATE and we have our daily estimated price, note that Compute is the total of vCPU and Memory from above.
Once your prices are established you can also see price history in Automation by exploring the Price tab in the deployment itself.
This was clearly focused on Price Rates being set in Automation, but you can also pull unit costs from Operations by toggling to Cost in your Automation Pricing Card.
Bottom line here is that we can set prices rates in Automation, but the calculations are being done by Operations (whether you're using Cost or Rate). Much more we can do here including wrapping requests with Approval Policies based on estimated prices, pricing of Automation Projects and Cloud Zones, and price limits, more to come!