hi

If you use shaping with policy-map, you may apply the policy-map either to inbound or to outbound and cannot control in both directions? is that true?

tks

Not clear whether you asking about where service policies might be applied, inbound and outbound, or traffic control in general, or both. So, I'll try to briefly cover all. Hopefully, I'll answer your question.

I don't recall whether you can use a shaper within an inbound service policy. However, if you're unable to, and assuming you don't have multiple outbound interfaces the inbound traffic can go to, you could place the shaper on the outbound interface. This could be done in the OP's case since each customer appears to have a unique subnet.

It is possible to have both an inbound and outbound service policy on the same interface. Again, there might be restrictions on what such a policy might contain.

Whether you use a shaper or policier (rate limiter) against inbound traffic, the inbound link might have already suffered congestion above the configured limits before it arrives at the shaper or policier. The shaper or policier will regulate the traffic downstream of it. Of the two, by default, an inbound policier usually offers less buffering and may better keep inbound traffic from bursting higher on the inbound link.

In other words, you can control or regulate inbound TCP traffic to some extent, although it's very weak in comparison to outbound control or regulation. For non TCP traffic, that isn't rate adaptive to packet discards, we can not influence the sender's transmission rate.

In the OPs case though, we're not trying to regulate inbound traffic volume, only the traffic rate permitted to/from a particular customer. I.e. the customer will not see or obtain end-to-end bandwidth beyond the limits we've configured.