Cost

Cost Composition

When an MRS cluster is used, the cost includes the following two aspects:

• Resource cost: indicates the cost of each type of resource and resource package, which depends on the MRS billing items. For details, see Billing Item.
• O&M cost: refers to the labor cost generated when MRS is used.

Huawei Cloud Cost Center helps you manage resource costs efficiently. You need to identify, manage, and optimize O&M costs on the page.

Cost Allocation

A good cost accountability system is the basis of cost management. It ensures that departments, business teams, and owners are accountable for their respective cloud costs. Allocate costs to different teams or projects so that organizations have a clear picture of their respective costs.

Huawei Cloud Cost Center supports cost collection and reallocation with multiple tools for you to choose from.

• Allocate costs by linked account.

  The master customer can use the associated account to collect the costs of the sub-customers and perform financial management on the sub-accounts. For details, see Viewing Costs by Linked Account.

• Allocate costs by enterprise project.

  Before allocating costs, enable Enterprise Project Management Service (EPS) and plan your enterprise projects based on your organizational structure or businesses. Select an enterprise project for a newly purchased cloud resource so that the costs of that resource will be allocated to the selected enterprise project. For details, see Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project.

  Figure 1 Selecting an enterprise project for the MRS cluster
  
• Allocate costs by cost tag.

  Huawei Cloud assigns tags to your cloud resources so they can be sorted in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. The following is the process of managing costs by predefined tags.

  

  Figure 2 Adding a tag to a cluster
  

  For details, see Viewing Costs by Cost Tag.

• Allocate costs by cost category.

  Enterprises can use the Cost Categories of the Cost Center to split common costs. Shared costs include the costs for the resources (compute network, storage, or resource packages) shared across departments or the costs that cannot be directly split by cost tag or enterprise project configured for the resources. These costs are not directly attributable to a singular owner, and hence cannot be categorized into a singular cost category. 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 accurately control and optimize your costs, you need a clear understanding of what parts of your enterprise incurred different costs. The Cost Center uses the cost analysis summary and filtering mechanism to visualize the original cost and amortized cost of an enterprise. In this way, the cost and usage trends and drivers can be analyzed from various perspectives and scopes.

Enterprises can also use the cost monitoring function of the Cost Center to detect unplanned expenses in a timely manner. In this way, costs can be monitored, analyzed, and traced.

For details, see Performing 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 and send alerts to the recipients you configured if the thresholds you defined are reached. You can also create budget reports and Huawei Cloud will periodically generate and send to the recipients you configured on a schedule you set.

  For example, an enterprise needs to create a pay-per-use cost budget for MRS. The monthly budget is $2000 USD. When the forecast amount is greater than 80% of the budget amount, a budget alarm is sent. Then, the created budget is as follows:

  Figure 3 Basic budget information
  
  Figure 4 Budget scope
  
  Figure 5 Budget alerts
  

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

• Resource optimization

  Cloud Eye helps you monitor resource usage, identify idle resources, and find opportunities to save costs. You can also identify resources with high costs based on the analysis result in the cost analysis phase, and then take optimization measures accordingly.

  • Monitor resource usage and evaluate whether the current configuration is too high. for example, monitor the usage of CPU, memory, cloud disks, and bandwidth.
  • Detect idle resources to avoid waste. For example, detect unattached EVS disks and unbound EIPs.
• Billing mode selection

  Different types of services have different requirements on resource usage periods and therefore require different billing modes to achieve the optimal outcome.

  • For mature services that are stable for a long time, use the yearly/monthly billing mode.
  • For short-term, unpredictable services that experience traffic bursts and cannot be interrupted, use pay-per-use billing.