Cloud FinOps

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, we’ll look into the nuances of how companies are charged for cloud resources. Correctly understanding this will help FinOps practitioners to create valid reporting that will assist all teams in making sense of the cloud bill.

Cloud Billing Complexity

Cloud billing data is complex. AWS alone has over 200,000 individual product SKUs, some that are billed at per-second resolution. This data comes in through multiple updates each day, with a complex interconnection of charges behind spending, such as instance hours, gigabytes of storage, and data transfer. We’ve seen large cloud spenders with billions of individual charges each month.

While there are platforms on the market to help decipher the complexity, it’s important to have at least one FinOps practitioner on the team with a deep understanding of the data. Not only will this help others understand and unpack billing concepts, but it also makes it easier to interpret the data and recommendations coming out of a FinOps platform. ...