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Cloud FinOps
book

Cloud FinOps

by J. R. Storment, Mike Fuller
December 2019
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
284 pages
7h 38m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Cloud FinOps

Chapter 8. Allocation: No Dollar Left Behind

This chapter is about the strategic decisions that you need to make before allocating your spend. While cost allocation is about assigning cloud costs to the correct business units within an organization, there are also many benefits gained by reporting those allocations to the whole business.

Why Allocation Matters

The advantages of leaving no dollar unallocated, unassigned, or untagged are vast. First off, you know who is spending what. You remove typical cloud cost discussions that end abruptly with “That resource doesn’t belong to me.” But most valuable of all, you can begin to individually trend each team’s forecasted growth (versus the whole company’s spend) and set budgets for teams so they know how they are doing against their targets.

Once you’ve established that, you’ll begin to know where anomalies are coming from, as well as which area of business and which workload drove them. Knowing what a resource is doing helps us begin to optimize intelligently by taking into account the characteristics of the environment. Is it production or development? How much do you want to push the boundaries of their respective CPUs? And so on from there. Meanwhile, teams receive a realistic daily view of their spending that ties to what finance teams are going to want to charge back to them at the end of the month.

You should be heading toward unit economics to give responsibility of the budget to the teams. Central teams are still doing ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492054610Errata Page