How to Help Customers Simplify Their Cloud Bills
… use the same tags for similar resources, while also applying their own unit-specific tags. That way, you can track spending trends for certain resources across the entire organization, as well as within individual groups of users.
2. Give your cloud resources meaningful names. In addition to tagging resources strategically, you can take the simple but powerful step of assigning meaningful names to cloud resources when you create them. Instead of naming a new virtual machine instance something like “VM27,” for example, consider a name like “HR-dev-testing.”
Having easily recognizable names will make it that much easier to figure out which costs correspond to which workloads and organizational units when you are reviewing your cloud bill.
Keep in mind that, in some cases, you can’t rename resources once you create them, so it’s wise to assign logical names from the start.
3. Assign different cloud accounts for different teams.
Another effective strategy for helping to keep track of who is spending what is to configure different billing accounts for different groups within your organization. If you are a small or midsize business, where all bills are paid by a central unit, this may not seem necessary. And, sometimes, it does make sense to use a single billing account. More accounts mean more complexity and more potential security risks.
Nonetheless, when it comes time to review bills and track spending, having expenses broken down into different accounts makes it much easier to map costs to specific units within your organization.
4. Use multicloud carefully. There are lots of benefits to adopting a multicloud architecture. But there are also drawbacks, one of which is the added complexity of tracking cloud spending. When you are receiving bills from multiple cloud vendors, it’s harder to keep tabs on where your money is going. This is especially true if you run redundant workloads on different clouds (that is, if you use more than one cloud to host the same application at the same time), or if you migrate workloads frequently between one cloud and another.
This is not to say that you should avoid multicloud entirely in the interest of keeping your cloud bill simpler. That would be an extreme position to take. But it is to say that you should factor in the complexity that multicloud adds to your cloud bill management before jumping on the multicloud bandwagon.
Conclusion
Cloud bills are complicated. There’s no way to eliminate the complexity entirely. But by adopting smart strategies like tagging, giving meaningful names to resources and separating cloud accounts effectively, you put yourself in a stronger position to see through the confusion and make sense of your cloud bill–and, in turn, to manage cloud spending successfully.
Christopher Tozzi has covered the channel since 2008, with an emphasis on open source, Linux, virtualization, SDN, containers, data storage and related topics. He also teaches history at a major university in Washington, D.C.
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