Unified approach to budgets APIs



Regardless of which cloud provider you choose and what your development and production processes are, it is crucial to have an understandable and manageable tool to control the costs of your cloud infrastructure. This is especially true if you have resources in different cloud providers and run between the tasks to get the optimal system and to keep your chargeback as low as possible.

Native Cloud Budget APIs

All public cloud providers have their own budgeting solutions that allow keeping records and maintaining costs of your resources located on their servers. However, all of these solutions are cloud-dependent and even though they are optimized for the definite provider, they usually differ in terms of logics, behavior, and UI representation:

  • AWS Budgets allow setting custom budgets and track costs and usage in many use cases – from the simplest and most ordinary to the most complex and challenging ones. AWS Budgets functionality supports different types of alerts and notifications (by email or SNS) to tell users that their actual or forecasted costs have exceeded the budget threshold or that their RI and Savings Plans coverage drops below the set level. You can read about AWS Budgets here.
  • Azure Budgets account for the Azure services consumed by or subscribed by the cloud user during a specific period. Azure Budget both help planning the costs and driving the organizational accountability and allow comparing and tracking the expenditures for the sake of the necessary cost analysis. Notifications are sent to the persons in charge thus informing them about their spending and giving the opportunity to proactively manage costs and to monitor how chargebacks progress over time. Resources are not affected, and cloud consumption is not stopped. Cost and usage data are typically available within 8-24 hours and budgets are evaluated against these costs every 24 hours. More details are here.
  • Google Budgets allow tracking the actual Google Cloud spendings against the planned ones. After setting the budget amount, you set the budget alert threshold rules that will trigger email notifications. Budget alert emails will keep you informed about how your resources are used against your budget. Automate cost control responses are supported as well. Reach here for the details.

As you can see, budgeting tools from different cloud providers aim to answer the same questions:

  1. How can I plan my expenditures?
  2. How can I track my resource costs?
  3. How can I learn that my chargeback threshold is reached?

Maestro does exactly the same.

But…

For all cloud providers in one place and at one time.

Budgeting in Maestro

Maestro is a truly consolidated center of budget control. It is integrated with the budgeting tools of AWS, Azure, and Google clouds; supports their functionalities for budget tracking and notifying; and allows working with native budgets without switching to native management tools.

In Maestro, budgets are created and updated via the Manage quotas wizard:

Manage quotas wizard allows describing all the quota rules in one place and then applying them via API for every cloud provider. To create a native budget, you just need to create a quota in the Manage Quotas wizard and specify

  • budget amount,
  • budget alerts,
  • cost threshold (% of budget).

You can have up to five cost thresholds for a single budget. 

For brand-new infrastructures, Maestro creates quotas with maximal budgets on the tenant and zone level. For infrastructures created before Maestro has started supporting native budgets, you do not have to re-create them with Maestro: Maestro will create a respective quota for you to give you the one tool for controlling everything.

Besides the basic budget functionality, Maestro supports monthly budgets and allows using filters and tags:

  • for AWS: cloud, region, tags,
  • for Azure: cloud, resource location, tags,
  • for Google: cloud and tags (beta mode).

One more specific feature that is provided only by Maestro and applies to all public clouds: Maestro allows setting additional actions for the new infrastructures intended for cost optimization:

  • automatically stop all instances when the quota is depleted,
  • requesting approval for the new instances,
  • deny running new instance after the quota is depleted. 

Email notifications about your budgets are generated by the respective cloud provider and sent to the main contact point specified when the budget was created. When a budget threshold is met, email notifications are normally sent within an hour:

To sum up

Maestro supports the unified approach for native budgets and allows creating and managing budgets in the same way as its innate quotas – via the Manage quotas wizard. Regardless of how the budgets are created and updated – in Maestro or by the native management tool – both Maestro and the respective native console tracks, obtains, and applies these changes. No matter cloud provider you use – AWS, Azure, or Google – and how many of them, Maestro is your one useful tool for managing costs of your cloud resources.

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