Cloud billing tools#
There are a few tools we can use to make cloud billing easier to understand, reason about and use.
Budget alerts#
All cloud providers allow us to set up alerts that fire whenever a particular project is about to cost more than a specific amount, or is forecast to go over a specific amount by the end of the month if current trends continue. This can be extremely helpful in assuaging communities of cost overruns but requires we have a prediction for what numbers to set these budgets at, as well as what to do when the alerts fire. Usually, these alerts can be set up manually in the UI or (preferably) via Terraform. We currently don’t utilize these, but we really should!