Managing Multiple Cloud Accounts

Principal Investigators (PIs) often manage multiple cloud accounts. The FinOps toolkit provides unified visibility, allowing PIs to view all accounts collectively on one screen or drill down into each individual account's metrics.

If you manage multiple accounts, you can transfer obligated funds between them, provided they are on the same cloud provider (e.g., moving funds from one AWS account to another AWS account). Transferring funds between different commercial clouds (e.g., from AWS to Azure) is possible, but requires manual support from ARC.

Cross‑Account Independence: It is important to note that separate cloud accounts operate independently and do not share costs. If you transfer funds to a receiving account, the usage in that receiving account will never affect the transferring account’s remaining balance.

Allocating Funds to Subprojects

Within a single Linked Account, PIs can carve out specific budgets for sub-teams using user:Project tags.

When teams share common resources, PIs can choose how those shared costs are distributed among the subprojects:

  • Fixed percentage: You define exact splits (e.g., Project A pays 60%, Project B pays 40%).
  • Equal distribution: Costs are split evenly across all involved projects.
  • Proportional allocation: Costs are divided dynamically based on each project's share of the total tagged costs.

Allocation Limits & Avoiding Tag Overlap

When setting up subproject budgets, the toolkit actively safeguards against accounting errors:

  • Limits: If you attempt to allocate more than your total obligated funds, a warning will appear. The system automatically reduces your available allocation amount based on funds already assigned to other tags or any negative balances.
  • Overlapping Tags: You must avoid creating overlapping tags that result in double-deductions. For example, if a specific user works exclusively on a specific project, you should not allocate separate funds to both their user:User tag and their user:Project tag.
  • To maintain clean accounting, PIs should avoid creating new tags after subproject allocations have already been set for the cycle.
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