Help Center/ Cloud Container Instance (CCI)/ Billing/ Cost Management
Updated on 2025-04-14 GMT+08:00
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Cost Management

Many enterprises now choose cloud native for IT transformation. Containerized applications can provide sharing, isolation, and elasticity capabilities and thereby reduce enterprise IT costs. The following describes how to manage costs in terms of cost composition, allocation, analysis, and optimization. Optimizing costs can help you maximize return on investment.

Cost Composition

CCI costs consist of two parts:

  • Resource costs: depend on the billing items of pods. For details, see Billing Items.
  • O&M costs: labor costs incurred during the use of CCI.

    Huawei Cloud Cost Center helps you manage resource costs with ease. However, you need to identify, manage, and optimize O&M costs by yourself.

Cost Allocation

A good cost accountability system is a prerequisite for cost management. It ensures that departments, business teams, and owners are accountable for their respective cloud costs. An enterprise can allocate cloud costs to different teams or projects so as to have a clear picture of their respective costs.

Huawei Cloud Cost Center provides various tools for you to group costs in different ways. You can experiment with these tools and find a way that works best for you.
  • By linked account

    The enterprise master account can manage costs by grouping the costs of its member accounts by linked account. For details, see Viewing Costs by Linked Account.

  • By enterprise project

    Before allocating costs, enable Enterprise Project Management Service (EPS) and plan your enterprise projects based on your organizational structure or service needs. When purchasing cloud resources, select an enterprise project so that the costs of the resources will be allocated to the selected enterprise project. For details, see Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project.

  • By cost tag

    You use tags to sort your Huawei Cloud resources in a variety of different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. The following is the process of managing costs by predefined tags (recommended).

    For details, see Viewing Costs by Cost Tag.

  • By cost category

    You can use cost categories provided by Cost Center to split shared costs. Shared costs are the costs of resources (compute, network, storage, or resource packages) shared across departments or the costs that cannot be directly split by cost tag or enterprise project. These costs are not directly attributable to a singular owner, and they cannot be categorized into a singular cost type. In this case, you can define cost splitting rules to fairly allocate these costs among teams or business units. For details, see Viewing Cost by Cost Category.

Cost Analysis

To precisely control and optimize your costs, you need a clear understanding of what parts of your enterprise incurred different costs. Cost Center visualizes your original costs and amortized costs using various dimensions and display filters for cost analysis so that you can analyze the trends and drivers of your service usage and costs from a variety of perspectives or within different defined scopes.

You can also use cost anomaly detection provided by Cost Center to detect unexpected expenses in a timely manner. In this way, costs can be monitored, analyzed, and traced.

For details, see Making Cost Analysis to Explore Costs and Usage and Enabling Cost Anomaly Detection to Identify Anomalies.

Cost Optimization

  • Cost control

You can create different types of budgets on the Budgets page of Cost Center to track your costs against the budgeted amount you specified. If the budget thresholds you defined are reached, Cost Center will send alerts to the recipients you configured. You can also create budget reports and specify recipients to receive budget alerts if any at a frequency you configured.

Suppose you want to create a monthly budget of $2,000 USD for pay-per-use pods and expect to receive an alert if the forecasted amount exceeds 80% of the budgeted amount. You can refer to the following budget information.

Figure 1 Basic budget information

Figure 2 Setting a budget alert

For details, see Enabling Forecasting and Creating Budgets to Track Cost and Usage.

  • Resource rightsizing

    Cost Center analyzes historical vCPU and other resource usage to identify idle pod resources and generate resource rightsizing recommendations. These rightsizing opportunities are places where you can reduce costs. You can also identify resources with high costs based on the analyses on the Cost Analysis page and use Cloud Eye to monitor resource usage. By doing this, you can determine the causes of high costs and take optimization measures accordingly. You can:

    • Monitor resource usage and evaluate whether the current configuration is too high. For example, monitor the usages of vCPU, memory, and disks.
    • Detect idle resources to avoid waste. For example, detect unattached EVS disks and unbound EIPs.
  • O&M automation

    Huawei Cloud also provides various O&M products to help you improve O&M efficiency and reduce O&M labor costs. For example:

    • Auto Scaling: You can automatically and continuously maintain instance clusters that use different billing modes, are distributed across AZs, and have different instance specifications. Use this service when there is a clear distinction between peak and off-peak workloads.
    • Application Operations Management: Groups of O&M operations can be defined as services to make it much easier to execute various O&M tasks. Use this service for scheduled O&M, batch O&M, and cross-region O&M.