Cloud financial operations encompass the systems and processes that enable stakeholders to monitor costs, manage budgets, and make informed financial decisions about their cloud account(s). These systems fall into two categories:

  • 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 alerts, warnings, access restrictions, and recommended safeguards.

The Science Cloud's comprehensive financial operations toolkit is currently under active development. The toolkit is being designed to provide the Science Cloud community with robust financial management capabilities that balance transparency with appropriate spending controls.


Funding Requirements and Procedures

Eligibility Requirements

The Science Cloud is exclusively available to NASA projects using NASA funds. External funding from non-NASA entities is not accepted. Funding must be formally obligated before any work can begin or resources can be used.

Budget Development Assistance for Cloud Computing Costs

Whether you are preparing a research proposal for future funding or managing an existing NASA project that is already underway, the Science Cloud Financial Operations team is available to provide assistance in developing realistic and accurate cloud cost estimates tailored to your specific needs. For research funding proposals that are in the preparation stage, these cost estimates should be carefully incorporated into the proposal budget from the very beginning of the planning process. Once an award has been granted and funding is secured, the Science Cloud team will collaborate closely with both the awardees and their respective program managers to ensure that funds are distributed and allocated appropriately across the necessary budget categories.

Important Note: Funds that have been specifically designated and earmarked for Science Cloud usage in grant budgets remain with NASA as the parent organization rather than being transferred to the recipient institution. These obligated funds are then applied directly and specifically to cover Science Cloud usage and associated costs.

Obligating Funds to Support Cloud Usage

Ames Research Center (ARC) serves as the institutional manager for all commercial cloud contracts supporting the Science Cloud. To access and use cloud services through the Science Cloud, Principal Investigators (PIs) should coordinate with their designated Resource Analysts (RAs) to initiate the transfer of funds to ARC for formal obligation to the appropriate cloud contracts.

Funding requirements include two components:

  • Cloud service costs: Direct expenses for computing, storage, and other cloud resources consumed by your cloud account(s) plus enterprise support from the cloud provider which NASA has negotiated as part of the cloud contract.
  • Overhead fees: Administrative costs that support the Cloud Computing Services (CCS) team who manages these commercial cloud services at ARC on behalf of Science Cloud accounts.

NASA projects have two options for transferring funds to ARC:

  • Direct transfer from NASA Headquarters: Request that NASA HQ send funds directly to ARC. This approach may be simpler for some NASA project structures but requires coordination with HQ finance staff.
  • Center-to-Center transfer: Arrange an inter-center transfer using two separate Purchase Requests (PRs). Two PRs are required because cloud usage costs and CCS support costs must be obligated under separate contract line items. This method provides more direct control but requires additional administrative steps.

ARC financial staff will provide detailed information on the specific dollar amounts required for both cloud costs and overhead when they coordinate directly with your Resource Analyst to facilitate the transfer.

How Funds Are Used: First-In-First-Out (FIFO)

Once obligated, funds enter a pooled system managed by a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) rule—the oldest funds pay each monthly invoice. Individual cloud account allocations are not tracked in monthly payments, but the Science Cloud maintains precise records of each cloud account’s usage and funding.

Important consideration: It is possible that a NASA project could get funds that had been allocated to a cloud account returned to the NASA project, but this is very dependent on the funds left obligated to the cloud account. The same details below apply to a cloud account that is closed but still has unspent funds obligated to it.

  • Same-year funding can usually be deobligated and used for other allowed work.
  • Prior-year funding may not be deobligatable, but can still pay for services used on the cloud contract.

New Cloud Account Requirements

When a new cloud account starts in the Science Cloud, an initial obligation of funds is usually required. This provides an opportunity for all those new to the process to become familiar with it. It also is a simple approach to verify that the funds expected to be used are in fact available to be obligated to the NASA cloud contract.

Monthly Obligation Deadline

For funds to be obligated in a given month, transfers to ARC must be fully processed and received by the designated mid-month deadline. If funds are in process but not received in time, they appear as "Expected" in the system—excluded from total obligated funds but listed as a reminder to verify status and resolve any issues.

Understanding the Science Cloud Billing Process and Financial Cycle

The Science Cloud's financial monitoring and billing system operates according to a structured monthly cycle that involves multiple stages and participants:

  1. Cost Collection Phase: The commercial cloud provider submits billing statements to NASA's authorized reseller and intermediary.
  2. Institutional Billing Phase: The authorized reseller then prepares and submits billing statements to the Cloud and Computing Services (CCS) service line in the Office of the Chief Information Officer’s (OCIO) Operations Division at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC).
  3. Cloud Account Allocation Phase: The Science Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) team reconciles the billing information and allocates costs to individual cloud accounts, with this allocation process occurring one-and-a-half months in arrears from the current month (e.g., by mid-March, the Science Cloud will receive the official report on Cloud Usage for the month of January).
  4. Reporting Phase: The FinOps team generates comprehensive individual cloud account reports and distributes these reports to the respective Principal Investigators. These reports provide detailed information about funds that have been obligated, the specific services that were purchased and utilized, and the remaining funding balances available for future use.
  5. Fund Transfer Phase: Principal Investigators coordinate and work directly with their designated resource analyst (RA) to facilitate the transfer of funds to Ames Research Center. These funds can be transferred through two pathways, either directly from NASA headquarters or through a center-to-center transfer mechanism between NASA facilities.


Cost Monitoring and Management: Observable Measures and Analysis

Observation-based measures analyze cloud usage data alongside funding information (both obligated and expected funds) to provide comprehensive financial visibility. These capabilities range from basic reports like cost tracking and account balances to advanced analytics that identify cost drivers, detect inefficiencies, recommend optimizations, and provide spending forecasts.

Actual Presented Costs

Understanding Cloud Provider Cost Estimates

All commercial cloud providers offer cost exploration tools that allow cloud account owners to monitor services used and their associated costs. However, these displayed costs should be interpreted with caution, particularly in large enterprise environments.

In general, for organizations that purchase cloud services through third-party contracts, several factors can cause discrepancies between cloud provider displayed estimates and actual billing:

  • Enterprise support costs not reflected in cost exploration tools’ pricing
  • Special pricing agreements for specific services
  • Negotiated discounts that may not appear in cost exploration tools
  • Dynamic pricing adjustments based on volume usage that occur throughout the contract or billing cycle

As a result, the costs presented by cloud provider dashboards should be treated as estimates only.

Why Cost Accuracy Matters

Cost estimates can be a helpful upper bound for planning purposes, but it's important to note they can be inaccurate—with typical variances of around 10% in either direction, though some services may show much larger discrepancies between listed and actual prices. While 10% may seem reasonable, it can represent more than a month of annual cloud account funding. An error of this magnitude could force premature cloud account shutdowns due to falsely predicted budget shortfalls, directly undermining the Science Cloud's mission to accelerate science.

To prevent these disruptions, the Science Cloud provides fully accurate cost reporting by incorporating all additional costs, discounts, and refunds from NASA's actual invoices, then allocating these adjustments to individual cloud accounts. This ensures each NASA project sees precise costs for their specific cloud services used.

How Cost Accuracy is Maintained

The Science Cloud maintains cost report accuracy through monthly reconciliation with ARC's official cost reports. However, two timing factors create temporary estimation periods:

  • ARC's One-Month Reporting Lag: ARC's reports lag by one month, creating a verification or reconciliation gap. When Science Cloud publishes August costs in early September, ARC has only verified data through July. This forces the team to rely on estimates for August, which—while generally accurate—can miss mid-month changes like discount adjustments triggered by usage volume increases. Science Cloud addresses this by marking unverified costs as "(estimate)" and reconciling them once ARC data becomes available. For example, August estimates published in September are reconciled in October when ARC's verified August data arrives.
  • Current-Month Cost Adjustments: Some cost adjustments depend on total monthly spend and cannot be finalized until month-end. For the current month, Science Cloud estimates these adjustments using projected monthly totals, then reconciles them once actual totals are known.

Cloud Account Balances

How Cloud Account Balances Are Calculated

Cloud budgets include both direct cloud service costs and overhead expenses. When ARC receives funds:

  • Overhead costs are obligated to the overhead contract
  • Remaining funds are obligated to the cloud contract

Cloud account balance reports (funding minus costs) reflect only funds obligated to the cloud contract, excluding overhead.

Obligated Funds Reporting

The Science Cloud updates cloud account balances as soon as ARC notifies them of new cloud contract obligations. This information comes from:

  • ARC's monthly reports: Comprehensive funding and obligation details
  • Interim notices: Updates between monthly cycles when new obligations occur

The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit will provide a complete history of individual fund obligations, enabling verification and validation by both PIs and Resource Analysts. All balances presented in the toolkit reflect total obligated funds, which are automatically updated when new funds are obligated to a cloud account's cloud contract.

Expected Funds

While the standard deadline for fund obligations occurs mid-month, fund transfers to ARC may continue beyond this date. When the Science Cloud is notified that a transfer has begun, a line item appears in balances indicating "Expected" funds to be obligated.

Expected funding does not count toward total funds or balances but provides a visibility reminder. When expected funds remain unobligated, it signals that a funding effort was initiated but not completed, potentially requiring intervention.

Fund Allocation to User Cost Tags

Given the available obligated funds, a PI may allocate any portion to any user cost tag they use, enabling balance tracking at the user cost tag level. When this allocation is performed:

  • Obligated funds totals do NOT change
  • An "Allocated Funds" field increases (or decreases if deallocated)
  • The toolkit prevents total Allocated funds from exceeding obligated funds balance

How Allocation Limits Work

When an allocation would cause total Allocated funds to exceed the balance of obligated funds, a warning will be presented and the available funds for allocation will be reduced by the amount currently allocated to other cost tags. If the balance for a cost tag is negative, the available balance to allocate will be reduced further by that negative balance.

Important Consideration About Overlapping Cost Tags

When there is an intersection of cost tags' costs, standard tracking may require additional review to account for the overlap. It is highly recommended to avoid separate allocations that have overlap—for example, allocating funds to a user:Project cost tag and also to a user:User cost tag when the named user:User also works on the named user:Project. Allocation capabilities will expand as the Science Cloud FinOps toolkit is further developed.

Detailed Costs Views

While total cloud account cost visibility is essential for high-level decision-making and budgeting, summary views alone don't provide enough detail to understand what's driving costs or how specific services impact your budget. Detailed cost breakdowns provide the insight needed to make informed decisions about resource usage and optimization.

The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit allows you to view costs by most categories that commercial cloud providers use to distinguish their services, including:

  • Linked Account Name - The specific AWS account where resources are provisioned
  • Product/Service Name - The cloud service being used (e.g., S3, EC2, Lambda)
  • Seller - Whether costs come from AWS directly or through AWS Marketplace
  • Usage Type - How the service is being consumed (e.g., data transfer, compute hours, storage)
  • Usage Quantity - Volume of resources consumed

When you select multiple categories, the system displays data at the intersection of those selections, enabling precise analysis. For example, if you select "S3" as the Service and "DataTransfer-Out-Bytes" as the Usage Type, the system will show costs for all S3 egress traffic during the specified time period. By changing the display aggregation from cost to usage quantity, the view will present total data transfer volumes in gigabytes.

Using Cost Tags for Drill-Down Analysis

Cost tags provide another powerful way to analyze and segment your spending. When you select "display by cost tags," the Science Cloud FinOps toolkit shows all costs associated with your specified tags, grouped by those tag values.

Refining your view: You can narrow the display by selecting specific cost tags only, or filtering to particular values within cost tags. This flexibility enables you to answer questions such as "How much did this user spend?" or "What did this user spend on this specific project (user:Project value)?"

  • Example - Single tag filtering: If project1, project2, and project3 exist as user:Project tag values, you can select any or all to see costs for just those projects.
  • Example - Multi-tag filtering: If you also have user:User tags (user1, user2, user3), you can combine selections across tag types:
    • Selecting user:User tag "user1" and user:Project tag "project1" displays all costs for user1's work on project1.
    • Deselecting the user:Project cost tag shows all usage tagged with user:User tag value user1, regardless of the project cost tag.

From an implementation perspective, it is relevant to note that the FinOps toolkit partitions data by the distinct entries of the commercial cloud distinguishing categories, together with the distinct values of all cost tags used by a cloud account. This provides for a clear way to allocate budgets that uses a nonoverlapping partition of the data. In the future, the FinOps toolkit will also include a simple analysis to describe how well a cloud account costs are covered by cost tags.

Detailed cost views do more than just show spending—they also enable precise budget allocation and usage tracking. The following section explains how these capabilities work together to help you manage cloud account finances effectively.


Managing Multiple Cloud Accounts and Fund Allocations

Many Principal Investigators (PIs) manage multiple cloud accounts, whether as several distinct cloud accounts within a single AWS Linked Account or Azure Subscription, or across multiple Linked Accounts and Subscriptions in the Science Cloud. The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit provides comprehensive capabilities to manage this complexity effectively.

Multi-Cloud Account Visibility and Management

The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit enables PIs to:

  • View all cloud accounts collectively with costs and obligated funds visible across cloud accounts
  • Drill down into detailed costs for any individual cloud accounts
  • Transfer obligated funds between cloud accounts where appropriate
  • Manage a common funding source from which to allocate budgets, maintaining non-negative balances for each distinct cloud account

Understanding Funding Accounts

A funding cloud account in the FinOps toolkit can take two forms:

  • Linked Account or Subscription with costs: An actual Linked Account or Subscription that incurs its own cloud-related costs
  • Funding-only account: An account solely for funding other cloud accounts with no costs of its own

The funding-only account option depends on ongoing toolkit development and will only be possible if the service can be delivered either as a free offering or via a fixed subscription cost per Linked Account or Subscription. To use a Funding Account, you must request its creation and identify which Linked Accounts or Subscriptions will receive funding.

Transferring Funds Between Linked Accounts

When a PI transfers funds between Linked Accounts, Subscriptions, or from a Funding Account:

  • The transferred amount is subtracted from the source account's obligated funds
  • The amount is added to the receiving account's obligated funds
  • Balances decrease and increase correspondingly in each account
  • The transfer is recorded in the toolkit and displayed in both cloud accounts’ funding histories
  • These transfers are restricted to within the same commercial cloud provider.

When the PI displays all Linked Accounts for which they are responsible, a total balance will be displayed representing the sum of the balances of each cloud account. The movement of these funds from the Science Cloud FinOps toolkit can only be done for cloud accounts that are on the same commercial cloud within the Science Cloud. Transferring obligated funds between different commercial clouds or managed cloud environments (NASA or otherwise) requires ARC support but is easily processed. The reallocation will appear in the FinOps toolkit after ARC submits its monthly report. It is important to note that costs from one cloud account do not contain costs from another cloud account, and the use of transferred funds by a receiving cloud account has no impact on the remaining funds in the transferring cloud account. This situation is quite different when funds are allocated to a subproject or service within the same cloud account.

Allocating Funds to Subprojects Within a Cloud Account

Within a Linked Account, a PI can allocate funds to subprojects, but all resources used by the subproject must be labeled with a user:Project cost tag value. The allocation of funds is processed by subtracting funds from the Linked Account obligated funds and adding funds to the subproject funds, reducing the Linked Account Balance and increasing the Subproject Funds Balance. Again, when the PI views the Linked Account total funding balance, it will display all subproject balances along with their sum, which represents the current total balance for the Linked Account.

Handling Shared Resources Among Subprojects

When subprojects share common resources that need to be apportioned among them, you have two tagging options:

  • Label shared resources with a user:Project tag identifying which projects share the costs
  • Explicitly identify that all unlabeled costs should be shared among specified projects

Three methods for allocating shared costs:

  • Fixed percentage: The PI sets specific percentages for each project (e.g., Project A gets 40%, Project B gets 60%)
  • Equal distribution: Costs are divided equally among all projects (e.g., ¼ each for 4 projects)
  • Proportional allocation: Costs are distributed based on each project's share of total tagged costs (e.g., A subproject representing 20% of tagged costs receives 20% of shared costs)

Budget Allocation to Any Cost Tag

Beyond Project tags, the FinOps toolkit allows budget allocation to any cost tag you use, providing flexible cost management aligned with your organizational structure. The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit actively prevents allocating funds to multiple cost tag values that would result in double deductions. To maintain accounting accuracy, new tags should not be created after budget allocations have already been performed for the current cycle.

Exercise caution when creating new tags after budget allocations are in place. This is an area that needs further refinement or restrictions to prevent this occurrence. You can also set controls and limits based on usage for any cost tags without concern for overlap, providing another mechanism for budget management (described later in the controls section).

Creation of Monthly reports

While the FinOps toolkit provides all information required to view funds obligated, costs and balances, there may be instances where these data are required for a report. The FinOps toolkit provides the ability to download the data in a report form showing funds obligated and expected with costs by month and balances. If alternative report forms are required, a request should be made to the Science Cloud FinOps team.


Observational Analysis

Cost analysis in the FinOps toolkit extends beyond viewing costs to examining usage efficiency and identifying optimization opportunities. The system provides insights into cost drivers, per-unit pricing, efficiency metrics, and alternative services that offer similar capabilities at lower costs. Cloud providers commonly offer discounted pricing through reserved instances or committed use agreements. These arrangements require payment for continuous service availability (24/7) over predetermined periods, typically ranging from monthly increments to 1-year or 3-year terms.

When prepurchasing services are an identified opportunity to save overall costs, the following is required:

  • 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 of such plans must be done through the Science Cloud FinOps organization in concert with CCS services

AWS savings options: 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 EC2 Instance Savings Plans

The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit analyzes your compute service usage to identify opportunities where IPs or CPs could reduce costs. However, there are restrictions on which plan types can be purchased.

Implementation process: For a PI to implement such cost-saving measures, they must collaborate with the Science Cloud Financial Operations team to execute the plan. Once these plans are purchased, the FinOps toolkit also provides metrics on the effective utilization of these plans.

Important notes:

  • All standard costs and discounts that apply to normal usage also apply to plan purchases
  • If new fund obligations are required, associated overhead costs must be included in transfers to ARC

Software as a Service (SaaS) Offerings

The Science Cloud provides Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings that simplify usage or reduce overall costs through collective procurement and management.

How SaaS costs are handled:

  • Charging: SaaS costs are charged directly to your cloud account
  • FinOps toolkit integration: Costs are included in all cost and balance computations
  • Cost transparency: Detailed breakdowns of the actual cloud services used within the SaaS are displayed throughout cost views


User Access and Permissions

Who Has Access to the Science Cloud FinOps toolkit?

Principal Investigators (PIs) have direct access to all toolkit capabilities for their cloud accounts.

Team member access: PIs can grant access to other project team members to view:

  • Usage metrics
  • Cloud account costs
  • Budget balances

Additional users can be added at the PI's discretion, providing transparency while maintaining financial oversight.

End-User Access

For cloud accounts that support end users (researchers or scientists consuming cloud resources), the FinOps toolkit can provide limited access to help them to:

  • Plan resource consumption based on available budget
  • Monitor usage against their allocation
  • Track proximity to established limits to avoid disruptions

All end-user access is managed and controlled by the PI, ensuring appropriate visibility while protecting sensitive financial information.

Cost Controls and Preventive Measures

Controls-based tools prevent cloud accounts from exceeding budget limits or cost thresholds through proactive safeguards. These tools help PIs maintain budget discipline while avoiding unexpected overruns through:

  • Alerts and warnings - Notifications when spending approaches or exceeds thresholds
  • Access restrictions - Automated controls that limit or block resource usage
  • Anomaly detection - Identification of unusual spending patterns
  • Suggested controls - Recommendations for cost management strategies

Setting Up Budget Limits and Thresholds

Limits can be set using:

  • Allocated budgets - For cloud accounts or any user:cost tag with formal budget allocations
  • Artificial control budgets - For cost management without formal allocations

The limits can be based on monthly consumption or longer periods of consumption, such as a period for development, or the end of a budget cycle. The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit will use AWS control tools to implement the desired alerts and warnings but will provide a simplified interface based on actual costs and either obligated budget balances or the artificial costing limit. This ensures working with accurate, NASA-specific cost information rather than cloud provider estimates.

Configuring Alerts and Warnings

Alerts can be configured based on:

  • Specific services (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambda)
  • Individual cost tags (e.g., specific user:Projects or user:Users tag values)
  • Combinations of cost tags and cost limits (e.g., user:User cost tag value of User1's EC2 usage within user:Project cost tag value of Project2)

Warning Thresholds PIs can set up to 10 warning thresholds per alert, providing graduated notifications as spending approaches limits (e.g., warnings at 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of budget, or specific dollar amounts).

Notification The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit will initially support email notifications for alerts, with plans to add alternative messaging methods based on user feedback and effectiveness.

Anomaly Detection

Beyond threshold-based alerts, the FinOps toolkit will include anomaly detection capabilities that identify cost generation patterns falling outside historically expected profiles. This helps catch:

  • Unexpected spikes in usage - Sudden increases that don't match normal patterns
  • Services accidentally left running - Resources consuming budget unintentionally
  • Configuration changes that dramatically increase costs
  • Unusual consumption patterns requiring investigation

This provides an additional safety net by flagging spending issues even before they hit configured thresholds.

Access Controls and Resource Restrictions

In addition to alerts and warnings, the FinOps toolkit can implement preventive controls that restrict or block resource access when limits are exceeded. Most access restrictions can be automated through AWS control mechanisms. However, there are limits to what can be blocked automatically. In cases where automated restrictions aren't possible, the Science Cloud operations team receives automated notifications to manually institute blocked access.

What Can Be Controlled

  • Project-tagged resources: Prevent future use of resources tagged to specific projects
  • User access: Deny access to resources for specific tagged users
  • Shared resources: Make shared resources inaccessible when appropriate

Important consideration: Access controls should be configured carefully to avoid disrupting critical work. PIs should work with the Science Cloud Financial Operations team to design appropriate control strategies for their projects.


FinOps Tools: Present and Future State

Tools Currently Available

Monthly Financial Report

Operating on a schedule of one month in arrears, along with an accurate estimate provided for the month that has just concluded, Principal Investigators receive an individualized cloud account report from the Science Cloud's financial operations team. These comprehensive reports provide detailed information about funds that have been obligated to the cloud account, the specific services that were purchased and consumed, and the remaining funding balances that are available for continued cloud account work.

AWS Cost Estimator Tool

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a cost estimation tool that Principal Investigators can utilize to monitor and track estimated cloud account costs and resource usage patterns. While this estimator can serve as a powerful and useful tool for both planning future resource needs and monitoring ongoing usage, it is critically important to note and understand that the AWS cost estimator prices represent only estimates and approximations. The figures provided do not accurately reflect actual costs for NASA users because they are based on standard base pricing structures. They do not account for the discounted rates NASA receives through its enterprise agreements, nor do they include Enterprise Support costs.

Tools Currently Under Development

Evolution from Monthly Report to Interactive Dashboard

As the Science Cloud platform continues to expand and enhance its services and capabilities, the monthly financial reports that are currently distributed to Principal Investigators will be progressively integrated into an interactive dashboard interface designed to provide improved accessibility and a significantly enhanced user experience.

The Science Cloud team is actively engaged in developing a comprehensive dashboard that will provide Principal Investigators with much finer-grain cost monitoring capabilities and insights. This will include detailed daily cost breakdowns organized by individual services or by cost tags over user-selected time periods and date ranges.

These interactive dashboards will also incorporate and integrate AWS optimization recommendations that systematically identify potential improvements and efficiencies in cloud service usage patterns.

Example Scenario: When an EC2 computing instance is operating at only 40% of its available capacity, the system will automatically suggest and highlight optimization opportunities such as migrating to a smaller instance configuration with fewer processor cores and reduced memory allocation at a correspondingly reduced cost.

By integrating these valuable AWS insights and recommendations directly into our dashboard interface, we aim to substantially increase visibility and transparency for Principal Investigators while providing actionable, data-driven recommendations for cost optimization strategies.

Alerts, Controls, and Spending Limits

The Science Cloud development team plans to simplify and streamline the process by which Principal Investigators can establish and configure alerts, controls, and spending limits on costs. These controls can be based on specific cost tags or targeted to particular services to provide granular budget management.


Contact Us: Request Features or Report Issues

The Science Cloud FinOps toolkit is continuously evolving based on user feedback and needs. If you identify a useful observational measure, analysis capability, or control feature that should be developed, or if you 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 suggestions
  • "FinOps Issue" - For bugs, errors, or problems you've encountered

What happens next:

  • Your email automatically creates a ticket in our development system
  • The ticket enters our development or issue backlog for review and prioritization
  • You receive a ticket number to track progress on your request
  • All ongoing communications about your suggestion or issue are centralized in the ticket system

What to include in your request: To help us understand and implement your suggestion effectively, please include:

  • Description of the feature or issue
  • Use case explaining how it would help your work
  • Current workaround (if applicable)
  • Priority level from your perspective
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