Anatomy of a cloud bill Flashcards
Summarized data, useful for finance and accounting but lacking granularity and freshness for FinOps purposes.
Invoices
Can help to visualize data and are suitable for single cloud service providers and basic reporting needs. They have limitations as complexity and scale grow, especially for multi-cloud organizations.
Cloud-native cost tools
Summary Invoice Data
Usage summarized for your whole organization
May be broken down by service name
May or may not include discounts
Several pages covering an unlimited amount of spend, delivered once a month after the fact
Accessible via files or API, providing all available details. While comprehensive, this data is complex to use and requires specialized knowledge and data analysis tools to interpret effectively.
Detailed cost and usage billing data
provided by the cloud provider (or third party, or internally built tool)
Usage is reportable and more flexible
May or may not include specific rates, metadata, summarization information
Business Intelligence type tools for creating custom reports, available anytime
Usage and Cost Reporting Tools
data via CUR file or billing APIs
Detailed usage information at full granularity
Extremely large datasets, up to billions of lines of data per month, are delivered each day
Detailed Billing and Usage Data
What is the difficulty about having several inputs to cloud billing/usage data?
Invoices too high level, CUR too detailed…have to use the mix that is right for you
This cloud provider has the most mature billing process
Still Invoice and CUR come out of different systems, rarely match 100% to the penny
Constantly evolving
CUR is third generation bill format
CUR fed by individual service teams, not entirely internally consistent either
AWS
This provider has billing APIs, but they are from the pre 2020s, lack things like list cost, amortization of upfront payments, prepaid RI costs, specific resource information (scale sets, eg),
Azure
This provider invoices monthly or quarterly, depending on customer contract
Azure
This provider has the most summarized of the three, constantly evolving their Standard Export(opens in a new tab) and Detailed Export(opens in a new tab) to add new columns to help customers understand their bill
Resource level information available for most services, the billing export is summarized at the SKU level
GCP
These providers provide data through an API, which allows more control over how big the data set is and how it’s summarized. However, these services also have multiple APIs.
Azure and GCP
Complexity of how one VM might be charged
ne virtual machine might be billed at various rates.
Some of a virtual machine’s time might be covered by reservations and some on-demand.
Each “usage x rate” or “time x rate” combination will be a separate line.
Name three detractors of the CUR files and vendor billing APIs
Many teams can be dumping data into the billing data.
Data quality issues can cause chaos if teams are building their own queries.
Service providers are constantly making improvements, but those improvements can be hard to track and mirror internally.
At the basic level, each line item in the bill has
a time or usage number and a rate
