Updated on 2025-05-22 GMT+08:00

Design Principles

Organizational, Process, and Cost Management Alignment

A fundamental principle of cost optimization is ensuring alignment between organizational structure, processes, and cost management. Establishing clear responsibility and accountability mechanisms is critical—even the most advanced cost optimization tools will fail without proper execution.

In terms of processes, cost management should be an essential part of every cloud migration process. In terms of organization, it is important to allocate the necessary time, resources, and personnel to establish cloud financial management capabilities. For example, before you apply for cloud accounts and cloud resources, it is crucial to have well-defined processes to link organizations, projects, cloud accounts, and resources, ensuring that each department or team in your company is accountable for the resources they use. Introducing cloud financial management capabilities to the enterprise finance also helps understand the relationship between output and costs of each department, even clarifying how much cloud costs are incurred for every dollar earned by the company. This helps optimize spending while maintaining business productivity.

The execution phase of cost optimization typically requires cross-departmental coordination involving operations, maintenance, and R&D teams. This process also demands close collaboration between platform teams and business units, underscoring the need to establish a comprehensive process involving all organizational members, such as a process for releasing idle resources, which requires engagement from all relevant stakeholders.

Enterprises can also generate regular reports and share them with stakeholders. Additionally, it is beneficial to hold joint meetings, such as monthly meetings involving various roles, to review budget execution, discuss risk mitigation strategies, summarize optimization experiences, and plan next steps.

Planning Ahead with Proper Cost Modeling, Budget Planning, and Cost Forecasting

Understanding the costs of each organization and project is not easy, especially when many cloud resources are shared across different organizations and projects. Therefore, it is essential to establish a foundational cost model early on that is approved by the management team. This model will ensure overall cost traceability during future cost optimization.

After the cost model is in place, it is important to create a budget plan. Introduce this budget plan and cost management at the beginning of cloud-based projects, and set thresholds for different levels of budget usage to serve as cost alerts.

Additionally, for users with Huawei Cloud accounts, Huawei Cloud offers cost forecasting tools that provide forecasts based on actual cloud costs. By utilizing these tools, cloud users can set up predictive alerts based on budget situations.

Monitoring Costs and Resource Usage

As business operations expand, more cloud resources are demanded, while idle resources must be efficiently released to optimize costs. At the same time, the architecture of cloud-based applications continues to evolve. Enterprises should establish regular cloud cost monitoring and review mechanisms, and adjust and improve cost optimization strategies based on actual circumstances. For example, a rapidly growing business organization may prioritize agility and adopt a more flexible cloud cost optimization strategy to accelerate growth, while a stable business organization may focus more on cost efficiency and design a stricter cloud cost optimization strategy. Enterprises can also utilize the cloud cost management tools and platform provided by Huawei Cloud Cost Center to automate cost monitoring and optimization.

Cost Reduction and Optimization Through Diverse Billing Modes, Resource Efficiency Enhancements, and Architectural Improvements

The main factors affecting cloud spending are rates and usage. Different optimization measures can be implemented through the analysis of cloud business models and cost data. In terms of rates, cloud services can be billed on different bases, such as pay-per-use, yearly/monthly, resource package, and spot pricing, each suitable for different scenarios. You can choose the most appropriate billing mode based on your needs to adapt to different business forms and reduce costs. In terms of usage, enterprises can reduce resource consumption by optimizing resource efficiency, releasing idle resources, downsizing, or implementing architecture solutions like hybrid deployment and elastic scaling to reuse resources and release idle resources during off-peak times. This also helps achieve savings in resource usage. As investments in cost optimization, resource efficiency optimization, and architecture optimization gradually increase, their impacts on the business increase correspondingly. Enterprises can determine optimization objectives and prioritize optimization measures based on evaluations of business objectives, impact on business, and optimization investments and returns.