When transitioning from a CapEx model, where many costs are fixed at the implementation of a project, to an OpEx model, where costs scale up and down with the usage of the system, customers often require cost management tools to understand, control, and communicate these cloud costs within their organization. Oracle provides tools to meet these needs and help you:
- Set and manage cloud budgets
- Prevent overspending
- Ensure accurate cost tracking across departments and projects
- Analyze which departments, services and projects are contributing to cloud usage over time
- Get granular usage details for invoice reconciliation
- Identify areas to optimize costs
Considerations While Provisioning Oracle Cloud Cost Management & Governance
Compartments
As discussed earlier in the Identity and Access Management section, compartments can be used to ensure isolation of cloud resources between business units. In addition, they are also used to logically group resources for the purposes of measuring usage and billing. We typically recommend creating a compartment for each major part of your organization, i.e. business unit or department. Compartments can also be nested to support sub-departments as well.
Tagging
Leverage tags to track cost and usage of resources that are associated with a particular project that span multiple departments. In addition, you can streamline resource management by tagging and then scripting bulk actions on exactly the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources you want. Tags leverage policies and controls to ensure tagging integrity and to prevent users from creating excessive tags, duplicate tags, and manipulating existing tags.
Quotas
Use quotas to allocate resources to projects and departments and to control usage of high value resources
Budgets
Once resources are assigned to compartments, e.g. matching specific use-cases or departments, or regions, budgets and alerts can be configured, so that unexpected usage is flagged before a budget is actually exceeded.
Cost Analysis
The billing cost analysis dashboard can help visualize the big buckets that are contributing to cloud usage and cost, namely cloud service, compartments and tags. With proper tagging, an analyst or administrator can use this tool to identify the difference between increased production or dev / test usage, as well as the difference between increased usage of storage versus networking.
Detailed Usage Reports
CSV files containing detailed resource-level and hour-by-hour data, including all associated metadata, i.e. tags and compartments. Export detailed usage reports as CSV files and import into your existing business intelligence tools for invoice reconciliation use cases, to get more granularity into your bill and to identify areas for cost optimization. For example, you can leverage the detailed usage data and combine with CPU utilization data from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring service to identify instances with low CPU utilization to shut down.
Consolidated and Layered Governance Policy Controls
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers both consolidated and layered access management and governance controls. For instance, you can enable a managed service provider (MSP) or systems integrator (SI) to manage infrastructure assets while still allowing your operators the ability to access resources. This is made possible through the superior design of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) console. The OCI design treats everything as a resource. Users, compute instances, block volumes, VCNs, route tables are all resources. Customers can group these into logical groups called compartments and sub compartments. The compartment construct lets customer mirror their organizational structure and makes it easy to define security policies that match those being enforced on premises.
Customers give the administrative interface high praise relative to alternatives because there is not a lot of bloat or unneeded applications in the console making it a lot simpler to set up security.
Tools to Use for Cost Management and Governance
In this blog you will explore 3 important tools for management and governance of the cost of your mission critical application over Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
