Cost Management

Cost Composition

ECS costs consist of two parts:

• Resource costs: cost of resources and resource packages, depending on the billing items of ECSs. For details, see Billing Items.
• O&M costs: labor costs incurred during the use of ECSs.

Figure 1 ECS costs

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.

  Figure 2 Selecting an enterprise project for an ECS
  
• By cost tag

  You can 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).

  

  Figure 3 Adding tags for an ECS
  

  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 multiple 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 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. 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 ECSs 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 4 Basic budget information
  
  Figure 5 Defining the budget scope
  
  Figure 6 Setting a budget alert
  

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

• Resource rightsizing

  Cost Center analyzes your historical CPU and other resource usage to identify idle ECS 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 more than you need, for example, you can monitor the usage of CPUs, memory, EVS disks, and bandwidth.
  • Identify idle resources, for example, there may be unattached EVS disks or unbound EIPs.
• Billing mode selection

  Different types of services have different requirements on resource usage periods, so the most economical billing mode for one resource may not be the best option for another resource.

  • For mature services that tend to be stable for the long term, select the yearly/monthly billing.
  • For short-term, unpredictable services that experience traffic bursts and cannot afford to be interrupted, select the pay-per-use billing.
  • For stateless web services and offline analysis services, select the spot pricing billing.
• O&M automation

  Huawei Cloud also provides various O&M products to help you improve O&M efficiency and reduce O&M labor costs. The following are examples of such products:

  • 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.
  • Auto Launch Group: In just a few clicks, you can deploy instance clusters that use different billing modes, are distributed across AZs, and have different instance specifications. Use this method when stable computing power needs to be quickly delivered and spot instances need to be used to reduce costs.
  • Resource Formation Service: Resource stacks with multiple cloud resources and dependencies can be deployed and maintained with just a few clicks. Use this service to deliver the entire system or clone an environment.
  • 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.