Design principles

Follow these key principles to improve cost management efficiency and achieve your optimization goals.

• Implement cloud financial planning and management: Foster a cost-conscious culture and establish cost accountability. Ensure that executives, finance, technical, and business teams collaborate on financial planning. Design and implement a cloud account structure and financial management model that matches your organization. Implement cost-aware management and optimization processes through teamwork. Use cloud financial and cost management services for budgeting, planning, unified settlement, cost visualization, and cost allocation.

• Measure return on investment: Set business goals and cloud cost budgets. Drive continuous cloud cost optimization by measuring return on investment (ROI). Use cloud cost visualization and allocation capabilities to measure and analyze the costs of application workloads. Combine this analysis with business revenue data to decide whether to increase investment or reduce costs for these workloads.

• Choose the right resources and billing methods: Understand your business goals and requirements, including those for application workload stability, performance, and security compliance. Understand the features, specifications, billing methods, and best practices of cloud products. Select cloud products and resource specifications that fit your business needs. Choose a billing method based on business characteristics and resource utilization to balance goals and costs. Using cloud-native Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) products is often more cost-effective than using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products.

• Add elasticity to application workloads: Reserve resources for stable workloads and use elastic scaling for dynamic workloads to meet business goals while saving costs. Request only the minimum required cloud resources for your applications. Scale resources dynamically based on business growth and traffic to take full advantage of the cloud's elasticity.

• Continuously monitor and optimize: Continuously monitor and analyze budget attainment, cost composition, and resource utilization. Establish regular review and governance processes in your organization to identify issues and drive ongoing optimization. For example, regularly check resource utilization. Manage idle, underutilized, and overutilized resources. Use resources efficiently and reduce waste by releasing resources, upgrading or downgrading their specifications, or changing their billing methods.