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Manage your Cloud Infrastructure Spend

When Trust Is Lost

“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. Read more →

The Value of a Cloud Infrastructure Budget

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. Read more →

Simple Overall Budget Alerting

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. Read more →

Export Billing Data for Improved Cost Management

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. Read more →

Applying Labels for Cost Management

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. Read more →

Eliminate Abandoned Resources

You’re probably paying for unused and forgotten cloud resources. These pesky resources linger without purpose. They hide under the radar, contributing to wasteful spend. Let’s find and delete these abandoned resources. What Are Abandoned Resources Also referred to as orphaned, abandoned resources became unused but were not de-provisioned. Read more →

Labeling Strategy for Cost Break-Down

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. Read more →

Break it Down with Cost Centers

Your cloud bill needs to be broken down in a way that is meaningful to your organization. This article talks about what a meaningful cost break-down looks like, why it is important, and how to define this for your organization using the concept of Cost Centers. Read more →

Cost Engineering

The biggest factor in cloud infrastructure costs is not your choice of cloud provider, what region you select, how many users your service supports, or how much data it processes. The single biggest factor is how effectively your solutions are engineered to make efficient use of the cloud platform. Read more →