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BackAll Project Costs at a Glance
One advantage of the cloud is that there are no fixed or investment costs; you only pay for what you actually need. The flip side of this is that managing cloud resources – such as creating or scaling servers – often has an impact on costs. With the new "Project Costs" view, everyone involved now has access to a clear overview: all cloud resources are listed individually, organized by type. This gives you a constant overview and allows you to check that everything has been implemented according to plan, for example after automated deployments.
Consolidation of scattered cost data
A virtual server at cloudscale can have up to 128 volumes – this means that PVs in a Kubernetes setup can be provisioned using CSI exactly where the pods need them. In the cloud control panel, the corresponding storage costs used to be displayed together with the server to which the volumes were currently attached. Especially in large setups, however, such a "coupling" did not always seem helpful. In contrast, other costs – such as for snapshots, Floating IPs, or load balancers – were only shown for the respective cloud resources.
For projects in your personal account or in an organization where you are a superuser, there has already been a clearer overview: in the "Billing" area of the control panel, all costs for a project are summarized on a single page. The total costs are broken down into compute, storage, and networking costs and listed individually down to the individual cloud resources. This overview is now also available to all other project participants, e.g. external collaborators or members of a partner organization; you can find it directly in the "Services" area by selecting "Project Costs" from the menu.
An overview of the current situation
The overview under "Project Costs" is not only useful when you need to answer questions from accounting or a customer. For example, take a look at this summary after an automated deployment using Ansible or Terraform; you can see at a glance whether the cloud resources created correspond to what you intended. As a sanity check, you can also quickly see from the costs if, for example, significantly too small or too large compute flavors have sneaked into an "infrastructure-as-code" config.
As usual at cloudscale, costs are shown per day so you can see what the currently present cloud resources would cost if they existed in this form for a full 24 hours. Of course, we continue to bill by the second: resources that you just created or will delete on the same day are only billed on a pro-rata basis. Object storage continues to follow a separate logic here: because these costs are calculated from ongoing usage, a point-in-time view is not possible; instead, you are shown the average costs of the last 7 days.
More useful information for you
With the consolidation of all cost information in "Project Costs," we have also taken a fresh look at other information that would best support our users in their work in the control panel. For example, you will now find a separate total for NVMe SSD and bulk storage above your server and volume views, or the overall object count for object storage.
We also recently introduced the "Balance History" in the "Billing" area. For your own account and for organizations where you are a superuser, you can track the development of your credit balance on a daily basis and see the amount charged for each project. For more information, simply click to view the Billing Report for the relevant project and day, where you will find a list of all billed cloud resources with their individual amounts.
With cloudscale, you only pay for what you need – and you can clearly see what that is at any time. This not only gives you the best possible overview, but also ensures you always have the right answers when communicating with internal and external stakeholders.
Straightforward.
Your cloudscale team