In cloud computing, cost control is a constant concern due to the dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure. More than ever before, teams need to constantly analyze usage and implement cost-saving measures to strike a balance between innovation, velocity, and fiscal responsibility.

The env0 platform helps achieve that by providing cost estimation and monitoring capabilities, which you can use to make sure your deployment costs will not get out of hand. 

Today, I wanted to talk about our newest FinOps feature, budget allocation and notification, for managing budgets on a project level and preventing overruns before they occur.

The Benefit of Cost Allocation

Cost control is the practice of monitoring and reducing spending. In the realm of cloud computing, it often takes the shape of periodic reviews of provider costs, which are typically broken down into different buckets, like services or regions, like so:

A bill like this helps with the surface-level understanding of different cost components. What it doesn’t do, however, is answer important questions like:

• What is the cost for each project(s)?
• What was the cost breakdown for different teams?
• What are the expenses for each deployment stage (dev, staging, prod)?

In the absence of such inputs, it becomes difficult to connect the dots between cloud costs and business outcomes. 

The alternative is to associate costs with specific users, departments, projects, features, or teams within a company. 

With the right techniques, this can completely shift the nature of the discussion, from a narrow debate about line items in an AWS bill to a strategic conversation about investments in specific projects, which merits you can use to validate or invalidate your budget decisions. 

The benefits of this are many, and all of them go back to more effective budget management, data-driven decision-making, and a deeper understanding for every team for their particular responsibilities. 

Smarter Budget Control with env0

Our new features give you the option to set budgets and define thresholds so that you can receive alerts whenever budget limits are exceeded. This enables granular cost monitoring and cost-benefit analysis, helping teams to be accountable for their own expenses, as independent budget owners.

For example, imagine a company…let’s call it SmartSoft. We’ll set up two projects corresponding to each of their top-selling products: SmartPage and SmartTasks.

With its new ability to track costs independently for each of those projects, SmartSoft can use env0 to easily identify the cloud expenses associated with each product.

For an even more detailed analysis, you can also drill down into spending for each environment. This can, for instance, help understand the costs by each deployment stage, ‘dev’, ‘staging’, and ‘prod’:

With the benefit of these data points, you’ll be able to reach complex conclusions like: 

“Our investment in SmartTasks is higher than SmartPages, but that’s okay since the project is also more profitable…on the other hand, there might be an opportunity to reduce the cost of Staging environments.”‍

Of course, this is just an example, but go back and compare it to the type of insights you could get from the AWS bill I shared above. When you do, you’ll see how granular this thinking is and how deeper the conversation can get.

And access to these insights is just one side of the coin. The other side is the new budget control capabilities that help you create auto-alerting policies for each project. 

As you can see in the image above, you can set these up based on different periods. Additionally, alerts might be based on different predefined and custom thresholds.

Besides providing a deeper measure of control, these budget alerts are invaluable for spotting cost anomalies and reconfiguring your IaC deployments to be more efficient with your cloud spend. 

They also give your team more confidence to try out new platforms and workflows, keeping an eye on the way new tools use resources so you can make smarter purchasing decisions.

Know Your IaC Costs 

Associating costs with teams, features, or projects gives you a deeper understanding of cloud spending, plus a new set of tools for cloud cost optimization, budget allocation, and preventing cost overruns.

The additional context, combined with the flexible alerting features, creates a powerful combination that will help save our customers time and money, and open the door for better resource allocations.

Looking to learn more about env0? Schedule time here for a demo.

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