Add cloud price publication & quote interface

[gerbsen]

Disclaimer: The following demo is an AI-generate mockup for a specific user story to prove a point and start a discussion within a specific target audience. The new AI-defined scs-04xx standard is only needed for example computation and is not meant as a real addition to SCS in its current form. Please consider this more of a conceptual rather than a technical question.

What I've noticed in the past couple of months working with SCS-compatible clouds is, that I can very reliably deploy workloads in clouds of multiple independent providers. I love that the behaviour is guaranteed to be identical. What I've also learned, especially within the discussion about the PaaS-standardization and usage metering in general is, that I don't know what a particular deployment would cost. Or to be more precise, which provider offers me the cheapest offer. OpenStack does not provide metadata for this use case and even if, it would be behind user authentication. I've seen several cost calculators on forum members websites for IaaS and KaaS, but those are, for me at least, not comparable and require repetitive and manual labour. For this reason, I think it would be very beneficial for the whole SCS ecosystem to make the costs transparent and machine readable. The advantages we would get, as I see them:

• all SCS-compatible clouds are more connected and federated
• I can programmatically buy resources within a financial budget over a timespan
• other companies (e.g. PaaS/SaaS provider) building on top of SCS IaaS/KaaS get better conditions and access
• CSPs get more exposure and sales through appearing in comparisons
• SCS-KaaS providers could build on top of SCS-IaaS providers
• through transparency there will be more competition and therefore faster growth
• at each stage a company can decide on hard facts to switch providers
• discounts for specific customers are easily configurable
• invoices can be generated automatically based on standards (xrechnung, zugferd) defined in the so-called Deutschland-Stack
• special features like environmental impact could be integrated as well

You can find the proof-of concept click-dummy here: https://scs-tech-demo-paas-and-pricing-62eb5f.gitlab.io I would be very interested in what you think about this proposal. I especially would want to know if you think something like this is necessary at all. In my opinion it would be a very beneficial step in order to get a broader set of users on board and additionally we can further underscore our claim of being a open, transparent and vendor-neutral cloud ecosystem.