Budget and cost management-Well-Architected Framework(WAF)-阿里云帮助中心

Cloud budget management allows enterprises to plan and create budgets before migrating to the cloud. During the migration process, you can monitor budget usage, receive alerts, and analyze variances between budgeted and actual spending. This process establishes a complete cloud cost management cycle and enhances the precision of your cost controls.

Accurately allocating cloud costs to each line-of-business is a crucial aspect of cloud cost management because it establishes accountability. Enterprises must regularly monitor and analyze the costs allocated to each team, track the reasons for any overspending, and empower teams to proactively and continuously optimize costs.

Manage cloud budgets

You can use the budget management tool to manage three types of budgets: cost budgets, usage-based budgets, and utilization and coverage budgets.

You can manage costs by setting spending budgets for yearly, quarterly, or monthly periods. These budgets can be set based on dimensions such as cost centers, accounts, and products.

Another effective method is to create budgets based on cloud resource usage. You can plan resource usage based on your business needs, calculate the corresponding budget amount, and then monitor your costs against that budget.

If you use savings plans and reserved instances, you can manage budgets based on utilization and coverage. For example, you can set utilization and coverage budgets for your savings plans and reserved instances for yearly, quarterly, or monthly periods. You can base these budgets on dimensions such as account, region, and instance type, and set corresponding alert thresholds. An alert is sent when utilization or coverage reaches the specified threshold.

You can combine these budget management methods.

Allocate cloud costs

Allocate costs through amortization

Cloud products are often purchased and used across different time periods. For example, a one-year subscription ECS instance is used over 12 months, and a subscription resource plan is consumed only when it is used to offset charges. Therefore, you should allocate costs to the actual usage period based on the principle of 'allocation based on actual consumption'. This method accurately reflects the product's cost and is the main difference between a 'fee' and a 'cost'.

You can use the Amortized Costs (deprecated, redirected) feature to allocate costs. This feature allocates your cloud fees, including both subscription and pay-as-you-go fees, to calendar months based on specified allocation rules. This helps you quickly understand your cloud cost allocation.

Allocate costs using cost centers

Cloud products are often used by different departments, projects, or lines-of-business. For fine-grained cost management, you should allocate costs to the actual users based on the principle of 'chargeback to the user'.

You can use the cost center feature to identify the fees from cloud resource instances that belong to specific departments, projects, or lines-of-business. You can use a custom 'cost center' identifier and create a custom cost hierarchy in a directory tree structure.

You can use three allocation methods to assign purchased resource instances to the correct cost centers. Automatic allocation assigns resource instances to specified cost centers based on rules. Manual allocation lets you manually assign resource instances to specified cost centers. Shared allocation distributes shared costs to other cost centers based on custom rules.

Use tags for easy cost allocation

Cloud cost allocation is primarily about allocating fees from cloud resources. You can apply tags to your resources and use the cost center feature to allocate these costs. The key steps are as follows:

Design a tag system: Use predefined tags to create a unified tagging plan for your resources. This plan must include cost tags for allocation. Set cost tag values to reflect your needs, such as application, project, department, or line-of-business.
Design cost centers: Design a cost center directory tree based on cost ownership. This identifies the project, department, or line-of-business to which each cost belongs.
Apply cost tags to resources: Ensure that cost tags cover all resource instances. You can apply tags when you create resources or add them to existing resources.
Set automatic allocation rules: In your cost centers, create automatic allocation rules based on tags. These rules automatically assign resource instance bills to the correct cost center. Ensure that the rules cover all resource instances to improve allocation efficiency.
Audit cost tags: Use Tag Policy to automatically audit your resource cost tags. This helps you find and fix any resource instances that are missing cost tags or have incorrect tag values, which ensures that your cost tag data is complete and accurate.

Allocate shared costs using cost centers

To allocate costs shared by multiple lines-of-business, first assign them to a shared cost center. Then, use the shared allocation feature in cost centers to add allocation rules. These rules allow you to split costs among target cost centers based on a custom ratio, which improves allocation efficiency. You can set the custom allocation ratio as needed. For example, to allocate the resource fees for an ECS cluster that hosts a shared service, you can base the allocation ratio on metrics such as the number of users per business or the number of system calls.

Use a multi-account structure for cost allocation in multi-organization scenarios

For multi-organization enterprises, you can use Landing Zone to plan your multi-account structure on the cloud. You can then centrally manage finances and costs for all accounts from a main financial account. After you map your organizational structure to your account structure, fees are separated at the account level. You can complete the cost allocation using a combination of cost center allocation rules and shared allocation rules. Cost centers support custom cost hierarchies. This allows enterprises to flexibly aggregate and view bills for resource instances across multiple dimensions, which improves cost allocation efficiency.