Creating annual budgets greatly facilitates the financial management of any company, offering medium and long-term visibility into projected expenses and thus enabling cost planning within the period. When it comes to cloud computing infrastructure costs, service providers currently offer features for this purpose, organizing one of the largest technology expenses for certain types of business.
However, when companies use hybrid and distributed multicloud environments based on more than one provider company, this process can become inefficient, given the differences between platforms and technologies, resulting in an ever-growing number of rules to be created and managed.
The Cloud8 Platform allows users to simplify enterprise budget management by grouping multiple providers into a single view, gathering simply and directly all the data needed to build the budget, regardless of the provider used. Check out how to do it below.
Step 1 – Accessing Cloud8 Budget Management #
In the left sidebar menu, select FinOps Reports, and then Budgets. Click New, and a blank budget template will be created for editing. Each field represented by a column needs to be selected and filled out.
Step 2 – Configuring the Budget #
Name #
The name to be given to the Budget. A good practice to adopt is to give names that make the function of the budget it represents very clear, along with the configured providers, business units, and defined grouping method (Tags, Invoice, or Product).
Budgets – Items #
Configuration of the providers assigned to the budget. When clicking the field, all registered providers will be displayed.
There are currently 3 (three) Budget formats implemented in the Cloud8 tool:
- Organization – Invoice
- Organization – Products
- Organization – Tags
Organization – Invoice (BETA) – This budget configuration monitors the budget through the Invoice generated by the providers. In scenarios where business units, applications, and products are properly separated by Billing Profile (Azure), Billing Account (AWS), Payer Account (GCP and Huawei).
Organization – Products (Technical) – This budget configuration monitors the budget through service categories offered by the provider. You can specify which products you want to monitor within the defined budget, which is recommended for scenarios such as new implementations and products (e.g., A PoC for using Artificial Intelligence resources, where you can set a budget to prevent costs from exceeding reasonable values).
Organization – Tags (Business) – This budget configuration monitors the budget through metadata and their respective values, allowing greater control of budgets at the business level.
Currency #
Define the currency to be considered when triggering alerts, directly impacting scenarios where the provider bills in a specific currency (such as AWS, which bills in USD), or contracts that do not have a fixed exchange rate.
Method #
The Cloud8 tool has several trigger methods to monitor budget overruns. For annual budgets, select Fixed annual cost BETA. Then, fill in the Budget with the total cost of the period, budget start date, duration in years, and filling method, which can be:
- Fill with consumed monthly values and divide remainder: for scenarios where monthly costs may vary, but the budget for the entire period is defined, and the project scope must be adjusted to the remaining balance.
- Proportional – divide by the number of months: for scenarios where there is a defined average cost, and monthly variations allow the identification of consumption anomalies and insights into cost and environment growth.
Integrations #
When configuring a budget, it is possible to integrate with a messaging system or email triggering for those responsible for managing the budget.
When #
Defines the granularity with which alerts are triggered.
- Daily
- Weekly
- Last day of the month
- Once a month when the value is exceeded
- Whenever the value is exceeded
Step 3 – Saving Changes #
Upon completing the configuration of all fields, remember to click Save, or all settings will be lost.
Final Considerations #
Budgets must be configured individually for each provider. If you want to create a Budget that encompasses more than one provider, you need to create a Business Unit.
