How Enterprise Ledger Helps Users Solve Cost Optimization and Budget Allocation

Author: Ichikawa

At the beginning, let's tell a little story, which is also a situation that many entrepreneurial teams often encounter:

Xiao Wang is the R&D leader of an Internet start-up company. When he first started his business, there were only about 10 R&D team members. At that time, his biggest pain point was how to lead the technical team to put Idea to the ground as soon as possible and launch the business. Therefore, the biggest appeal at that time was that the business could develop and iterate quickly, and at the same time, the business volume was not too large, and the cost of cloud resources was not too high, and naturally it would not be too concerned about the cost allocation of cloud resources. However, with the rapid development of the business, the business structure has also changed from the original single application to a microservice application. At the same time, Xiao Wang's company has also expanded rapidly, and the R&D personnel have also expanded from 10 to more than 100.

At this time, Xiao Wang, as the company's CTO, had to focus more on the management of the R&D team from the governance of the technical architecture. At this time, the R&D team in front of him is divided into 7 or 8 groups, responsible for different microservice modules, including user center, transaction center, log center, etc. The cost of cloud resources increases exponentially​ , cost optimization and budget allocation have also become Xiao Wang's top priorities.

So is there a good tool that can help Xiao Wang solve these problems? At this time, it is necessary to take advantage of an advanced enterprise feature - enterprise accounting.

Introduction of SAE Enterprise Account Splitting Capability

Serverless Application Engine (SAE), as a mature and excellent PaaS platform after years of development, naturally has the ability of enterprise account sharing. The cost center of the cloud performs some configuration, and finally completes the accounting.

Label planning

When cloud resources (that is, applications in SAE) gradually increase, using tags to manage and classify resources in groups can facilitate searching and aggregation of resources. The most common is to set different labels for different environments or projects. Examples are as follows:

• Environment isolation: Bind different tags to different environments (such as production and test environments), operating systems (such as Windows Server and Linux), or client platforms (such as iOS and Android).
• Project management: In team or project management, you can add tags with the dimensions of groups, projects or departments (such as CostCenter: aliyun) to achieve grouping and account-sharing management.

Implementation

The operation method of SAE to realize enterprise accounting is as follows:

1. Plan labels for resources (applications) based on organizational or business dimensions. (① in the picture)
2. Bind tags to applications through the SAE console or API, and establish the relationship between applications and tags. (② in the picture)
3. View bills through the Alibaba Cloud User Center. (3 in the picture)

• step one

First, plan labels according to your own business, and then you can go to the application management page of the SAE console to edit labels. Tags are composed of a pair of key-value pairs (Key-Value), and each application can have up to 20 tags.

• Step 2

Expense labels need to be enabled in the expense center. After enabling, the bills of cloud resources included in the relevant labels will actually carry the label information. Only when the bill has a label, we can filter by label in the bill details.

In addition, we can also add a new financial unit, and assign the resources of related tags to this financial unit. The financial unit here can be understood as a collection of cost statistics. Allocating resource instances to the created "Financial Unit", and flexibly aggregate and view the billing charges of the corresponding resource instance according to the "Financial Unit" dimension. For example, different cloud resources with the same label (equivalent to the same department) can be unified into one financial unit for unified billing statistics and management.

• Step 3

Finally, you can view the relevant detailed bills of the corresponding financial unit in the separate bills, and can also export them for further data processing. The "Split Bill" contains the cost details of the CPU and memory of the SAE application. Users can use it to view the specific usage of each "split item". At the same time, each charge item also includes the label information, so it is used as a reference for the internal billing of the enterprise. .

Check the custom column in the sub-account bill, and deduct the usage from the resource package to display the metering details in the console.

At this point, we can see the relevant bill details, and for pay-as-you-go customers, we can see the usage of related instances. For users who have purchased resource packs, they can also see the deduction of resource packs.

In addition, you can filter and display bill details based on tags, and you can also export the entire bill to a CSV format file for statistical analysis.

Summarize

We can find that the function of enterprise account splitting is a scenario for enterprise customer consumption expense splitting, which solves the problem of internal chargeback of enterprise expenses. Enterprise expense sharing is an essential requirement for both large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises where Xiao Wang is located. It is not only an important symbol for an enterprise to become standardized and mature, but also an important consideration for enterprises to choose cloud products when going to the cloud. Therefore, the labeling function is also an important manifestation of SAE's enterprise-level capabilities.

Serverless App Engine SAE (Serverless App Engine) is a fully managed, O&M-free, highly elastic general-purpose PaaS platform. SAE supports full hosting of Spring Cloud, Dubbo, HSF, Web applications, XXL-JOB, and ElasticJob tasks, zero-transformation migration, no threshold containerization, and provides many enhancements on the open source side and advanced enterprise-level features.