“Trust dies but mistrust blossoms”
- Sophocles
When you have responsibility for a significant expense it is important for you to manage that expense. If you do that poorly, you can lose the trust of your organization’s executive team. In this article, we look at what poor cloud cost management looks like, and we look at the problems it can lead to that hold your organization back.
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…Penny wise but pound foolish…
…Tripping over dollars to pick up pennies…
It’s foolish to give up $100 to save $1. Yet that’s what happens when we over-invest in cost optimization. We save $1 and miss an opportunity worth $100.
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Negligent trust is when someone depends on another to take care of something, but the other doesn’t know that they need to take care of it.
We’ve learned, through some difficult lessons, that this ambiguous attitude toward responsibilities doesn’t work with Information Security.
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People hate budgets. They hate budgeting. A common attitude is that budgets are only useful for being rolled up to hit people over the head with when things don’t go as planned. They’re only created when Finance demands them. Minimal effort is put into their creation “because too many unknowns”, and once created, they’re completely ignored until the cycle is repeated next year.
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No one likes to be surprised by a large expense. With cloud infrastructure, a simple mistake left unattended can result in an unexpectedly high bill. This is true of small $5 a month personal accounts and it is true of the largest accounts.
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Your provider’s tools are inadequate for managing your cloud bill. Exporting your consumption detail is an essential foundation for cost management.
In this article we show how to establish this on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We’ll configure a billing account to export to Google’s BigQuery and then make it useful for queries - both for monitoring processes and reporting - building on the cost-center labeling1 we’ve established.
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Once you’ve defined cost-centers1 for your organization, and created a labeling strategy2, it is time to apply labels so that you can manage your spend.
Your first priority should be to label projects with a cost-center. Resources inside those projects will inherit the project label for cost allocation.
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Labeling cloud resources allows you to group costs and create a manageable, business-relevant break-down of your expenses.
In this article we look at a strategy for applying labels consistently across your environment for support of cost management practices.
We look at how labels are used to support billing break-down, and an example labeling standard you may build on for your organization.
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