Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Anatomy of the Cloud Bill

In this chapter, we’ll examine the fundamentals of how public cloud services are billed and the way those charges are represented in billing data. Understanding a cloud bill is key to being able to allocate and optimize cloud costs later in the FinOps lifecycle. The structure of an organization’s cloud spending will also help determine who will perform certain optimization actions, as well as how FinOps work will be delegated.

Instead of looking at individual billing lines (which is sometimes required in FinOps data deep dives), this chapter looks into how cloud service providers present data to companies to charge for cloud resources. Correctly understanding this will help FinOps practitioners to create impactful reporting that will assist all teams in making sense of the cloud bill. Chapter 8 uses these concepts to influence the user interface (UI) of FinOps.

Types of Cloud Bill

The top cloud service providers offer you access to your cloud billing data in one of three ways:

An invoice

This is lousy for FinOps, as it’s very summarized and does not provide enough data granularity or freshness. Primarily, invoices are useful for finance and general accounting purposes.

Cloud native cost tools

Native tools (e.g., AWS’s Cost Explorer) visualize your data and can be great if you’re using only a single cloud service provider and if your reporting needs are fairly basic. But as the complexity and scale of your cloud environment grow—especially ...