How to Help Customers Simplify Their Cloud Bills

Cloud computing can be costly. And while there are a variety of techniques available for optimizing cloud spend, any company with a sizeable cloud footprint should also be working to make their cloud bill easier to understand. If you struggle to figure out what you actually paid for when reviewing a cloud bill, it’s hard to know where resources are being wasted or how you can make your cloud more cost-effective.This article isn’t about reducing overall cloud spending, a topic that has already been covered widely; instead, it’s about empowering yourself to make sense of the cloud bill with it arrives, enabling you to manage cloud costs more effectively. Cloud bills vary from one cloud vendor to the next, but they all share some common characteristics. They are usually delivered in the form of an interactive Web-based console that summarizes your overall cloud computing costs for a given period, and breaks down those costs into different categories of services (like virtual machine instances and data storage). Most cloud billing interfaces also let you drill down deeper into these categories to see exactly where and when specific costs were incurred.