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).
The Science Cloud's financial operations tools 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 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.
(Your email automatically creates a ticket in our system, and you will receive a ticket number to track progress).