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Measured service is a delivery model in which a utility provider monitors how much of a particular service each customer consumes within a designated time period. Measured services give the provider insight into resource consumption and provide customers with transparency into how they are billed for the services they consume.
Measured services are supported by metering capabilities appropriate to the type of service consumption in question. For example, metering for cloud computing resources can be based on how much storage the cloud customer uses, how much processing power they use, how much network bandwidth they consume — or in the case of SaaS applications, the number of active user accounts.
Measured services are an important characteristic of cloud computing according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Techopedia Explains Measured Service in Cloud Computing
The idea of measured service is one of five components of a definition of cloud computing supported by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). The other four components are rapid elasticity, resource pooling, on-demand self-service and and broad network access.
According to NIST, measured services benefit both the provider and the consumer because they provide both entities with transparency into what resources are being consumed and which end users or applications are using them. In more traditional systems, items like invoices and service change agreements filled these same roles.
