Q7. Routinely audit and validate billed usage

It is the responsibility of service owners to be good stewards of financial resources spent on public cloud computing services. To this end, service owners need to know what they are spending on each service, and make sure that this expenditure is optimal for the service delivered and compares favorably to alternatives.

A prerequisite to associating billed usage with service is a consistent tagging strategy^Q2. Resource tags can be used to categorize expenditures by application or service.

Service owners should develop a strategy for periodically assessing spending and associating costs with both the classes of infrastructure assets and the services those assets support. This will yield a better sense of the true cost of running a service operationalized as a cloud workload, as well as providing a check to help validate actual expenditures against expectations.