Cloud financial operations encompass Science Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) provides the systems and processes that enable stakeholders to monitor costs, processes, and analytics necessary for NASA projects to monitor their cloud usage, manage budgets, ensure spending discipline, and make informed financial decisions about their cloud account(s).
The Science Cloud's financial operations tools fall into two categories:FinOps environment is designed to give stakeholders full visibility into their cloud accounts through two major categories of tools:
- Monitoring tools: These features allow you to track costs, view account balances, identify what is driving your costs up, detect inefficiencies, Observation-based tools: Track costs and account balances, analyze cost drivers, identify inefficiencies, suggest optimizations,
- and generate spending forecasts. Controls-based tools: Prevent exceeding limits through
- Budget controls: These features protect your budget by delivering alerts, warnings, and access restrictions , and recommended safeguards
- to prevent accidental overspending.
The comprehensive FinOps toolkit is currently under active development, designed to provide the Science Cloud community with robust financial management capabilities that balance transparency with appropriate spending controls.
Tools Currently Available
Monthly Financial Reports Operating on a schedule of one month in arrears, Principal Investigators receive an individualized cloud account report from the Science Cloud's financial operations team. These comprehensive reports detail obligated funds, specific services purchased, and remaining available funding balances. An accurate estimate is also provided for the month that has just concluded.
AWS Cost Estimator Tool AWS offers a cost estimation tool for monitoring estimated costs and usage. Important: The figures provided by AWS represent estimates only. They do not accurately reflect actual costs for NASA users because they are based on standard base pricing and do not account for NASA's enterprise discounted rates or Enterprise Support costs.
Tools Under Development
As the Science Cloud platform expands, monthly financial reports will be progressively integrated into an interactive dashboard interface.
- Interactive Dashboard: Will provide fine-grained cost monitoring, including detailed daily cost breakdowns organized by individual services or cost tags over user-selected time periods.
- Automated Optimization: Will integrate AWS optimization recommendations to systematically identify efficiencies (e.g., suggesting a downgrade to a smaller, cheaper instance if an EC2 compute instance is operating at only 40% capacity).
- Self-Service Controls: Will simplify how Principal Investigators establish alerts, controls, and spending limits based on specific cost tags or services.
Contact Us: Request Features or Report Issues
The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit is continuously evolving based on user feedback. If you identify a useful capability or encounter an issue, we want to hear from you.
- Email:
support@sciencecloud.nasa.gov - Subject Line Format:
FinOps Feature- For feature requests or new capability suggestionsFinOps Issue- For bugs, errors, or problems
- What to include: A description of the feature/issue, a use case explaining how it impacts your work, any current workarounds, and your perceived priority level.
being expanded from a monthly reporting system into a full interactive dashboard. Once complete, this dashboard will offer daily cost views, detailed breakdowns by specific services, integrated AWS cost-saving insights, and custom alerts.
Reporting and Cost Estimation
Currently, Principal Investigators receive individualized monthly financial reports issued one month after the billing cycle ends. These reports detail your obligated funds, specific service usage, remaining balances, and accurate cost estimates for the just‑completed month.
A Warning About the AWS Cost Estimator: While you can view your estimated pricing in native cloud dashboards like AWS Cost Explorer, you should not use this as a source of true cost accuracy. Native AWS dashboards do not reflect NASA’s enterprise discounts, nor do they include your Enterprise Support costs.
Who Can Access the FinOps Toolkit?
To protect sensitive financial data while ensuring transparency for researchers, the toolkit operates on a strict permission model controlled entirely by the Principal Investigator.
- Principal Investigators (PIs): PIs have full administrative access to all toolkit functions, financial data, and permission controls for their accounts.
- Team Members: PIs can grant specific team members access to view overall account usage, costs, and budget balances.
- End Users (Researchers): For cloud accounts that support individual scientists using resources, PIs can grant them limited access. This allows researchers to monitor their individual usage against their allocated budgets so they can avoid hitting resource limits.
How to Get Support or Request Features
The FinOps toolkit is continuously evolving, and we encourage user feedback. To request a new feature or report an issue, please email support@sciencecloud.nasa.gov.
- Use the subject line “FinOps Feature” if you have an idea for a new capability, or “FinOps Issue” if you are experiencing a problem.
- In your email, please include a description of the issue, your specific use case, your perceived priority level, and any workarounds you are currently using.
Submitting an email automatically generates a ticket, ensuring centralized communication with our development team. Additionally, if you need to download financial data in a specific report format not currently available in the toolkit, you can request custom formats through this same support email(Your email automatically creates a ticket in our system, and you will receive a ticket number to track progress).