To help Principal Investigators protect their funding, the FinOps toolkit provides tools to establish proactive safeguards and prevent budget overruns.
Setting Up Alerts and Warnings
You can configure custom budget limits using either formally allocated budgets or temporary spending caps (for example, capping spend for a specific one-week development sprint).
Alerts can be targeted broadly to an entire account, or narrowed down to specific services, cost tags, or combinations of both (e.g., setting an alert specifically for EC2 usage by a single user within a specific project). PIs can configure up to 10 thresholds per alert, allowing you to receive escalating warnings when you hit 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of your limit. Currently, these notifications are sent via email, with additional communication channels planned for the future.
Anomaly Detection
Beyond simple threshold alerts, the toolkit actively monitors your environment for unusual spending patterns. This includes sudden spikes in usage, expensive services that were accidentally left running overnight, and configuration changes that artificially inflate your costs.
Access Controls and Resource Restrictions
When budget limits are exceeded, the system can deploy both automated and manual access restrictions to stop further spending. These restrictions can block access to project‑tagged resources, lock out specific users, or shut down shared resources.
In situations where automation cannot successfully enforce a restriction, the operations team receives an automated notification to step in and implement the blocks manually.
Important: FinOps highly encourages PIs to configure these access controls carefully. Setting overly aggressive automatic blocks can unintentionally disrupt critical scientific work mid-process. We recommend working with the FinOps team to design a safe strategy
The FinOps toolkit provides insights into cost drivers, per-unit pricing, and efficiency metrics to help identify optimization opportunities (e.g., alternative services that offer similar capabilities at lower costs).
Prepurchasing Services (AWS Savings Plans)
Cloud providers commonly offer discounted pricing through committed use agreements, requiring payment for continuous 24/7 service over predetermined periods (up to 1 year).
AWS offers two types of cost-saving plans:
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans (IPs): Reserve specific EC2 instances; typically offer larger discounts.
- Compute Savings Plans (CPs): Cover a broader mix of compute services; offer more flexibility but generally smaller discounts than IPs.
Requirements for Prepurchasing: If prepurchasing is an identified opportunity to save costs, the following rules apply:
- Plans must be prepaid when procured.
- An obligated funds balance must cover the full purchase amount.
- Currently, 1 year is the longest commitment term available.
- Procurement must be done through the Science Cloud FinOps organization in concert with CCS services.
Implementation: PIs must collaborate with the Science Cloud FinOps team to execute a savings plan. Once active, the toolkit provides metrics on the effective utilization of the plans. Note: If new fund obligations are required to purchase the plan, associated overhead costs must be included in the transfer to ARC.
Software as a Service (SaaS) Offerings
The Science Cloud provides SaaS offerings that simplify usage and reduce costs through collective procurement.
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