How budgets work
A budget limits what a member, project or workspace is allowed to spend. Three things define one: what it measures, what it applies to, and whether it runs once or resets on a cycle.
How a budget relates to a deposit
A deposit holds money. A budget permits spending. Because they answer different questions, a job has to satisfy both before it launches, and either one can block it on its own.
A deposit can be fully funded while a budget stops a job, and a budget can be nowhere near its cap while the deposit behind it is empty. When somebody reports being blocked, working out which of the two is responsible is the first useful step, because the remedies have nothing in common. One needs funding and the other needs a higher cap.
What a budget measures
A cost budget caps charges in your currency. It can cover every charge type or only a subset, so you are able to cap software spending while leaving compute uncapped. Compute, platform, IP address, workstation license, software, data transfer, storage, license proxy and license host charges all count towards one.
A core-hour budget caps the compute core hours consumed by jobs, workstations and High-Performance Storage clusters. It exists because compute generates no real-time charge in your currency under On-Demand Reserved, Bring-Your-Own-Compute and hybrid arrangements. A cost budget has nothing to measure in those cases, and core hours are the only meaningful unit of consumption available.
A cost budget and a core-hour budget can target the same entity at the same time, which is usually what a workspace with both metered spend and reserved capacity needs.
The Economics Dashboard reports spend, so it has nothing to show for a budget measured in core hours. Track those against the Utilization Dashboard instead.
What a budget can be set against
A budget targets one of four things: an individual member, a workspace, a set of workspaces across the organization, or a project. The target determines both whose spending is capped and which charges count towards the cap.
A project budget is narrower than the others in what it counts, not only in who it applies to. Storage and data transfer charges are never attributed to a project, so a project budget does not see them at all. A team can therefore stay comfortably inside a project budget while generating storage charges that only a workspace or organization budget would catch.
You choose which workspaces an organization budget applies to. A workspace created later is not added to it automatically, so a new team can run outside a cap you believed was organization-wide. Revisit the budget whenever you add a workspace.
Who can change a budget once it is set
A budget created by a higher-level role cannot be modified by a lower-level one. An organization admin can set a workspace budget that the workspace admin is unable to raise, and the same holds for a member budget that the member cannot adjust for themselves. This is worth knowing before you ask a team to manage their own spending, because a budget you set on their behalf will stay where you put it.
When several budgets apply at once
A single job can fall under a member budget, a project budget, a workspace budget and an organization budget simultaneously. Two rules settle which one is enforced, and they are applied in order.
Level decides between budgets at different levels. The order of precedence runs:
Member > Workspace > Organization > Project
A member budget is enforced even when every budget above it has headroom to spare.
The lowest remaining amount decides between budgets at the same level. Where two budgets sit at the same level and both apply, the one with less left is enforced rather than the one with the smaller original cap. A large budget that is nearly spent is therefore more restrictive than a small one nobody has touched, which means the cap blocking a job is not necessarily the smallest figure you set.
If a member has a $500 cap inside a workspace with a $50,000 cap, the member still stops at $500. Raising the workspace budget has no effect. Check the member level first when someone reports being blocked unexpectedly.
Related
- Create a budget — setting one up
- Budget enforcement — what happens at the cap
- Spend notifications — the 50/80/100% alerts
- Deposit types — the funding side