Controlling Cloud Usages with Quotas

Use Case/Scenario 

A CloudBolt customer wants to prevent the over-provision or use of resources by different teams or technologies. The Administrators can configure Quotas on several areas of CloudBolt to accomplish this to help prevent vm-sprawl and cost inflation. While limits can be applied in multiple areas of CloudBolt, if a provision will cause any configured quota to be surpassed, the build will be put in a “awaiting approval” status to allow administrators to ignore the quota for the build.

The Administrator can apply limits for CPU, Memory, and Disk Size, as well as overall VM Count and even Rate costs. These limits can be applied on the Group, Environment, or Resource Handler within CloudBolt.

Group Quota Limits

1. The most common use case is to apply limits per group. When viewing the overall groups tab, you can see the utilization of each group compared to the limit set on that group. When there is no limit set, the quota will show an infinity symbol.

   

2. To configure these quotas, navigate to the group details page for a specific group, then the “Quotas Tab”. Here you can edit the quota limits and view overall utilization of the group.

   

Environmental Quota Limits

1. To Configure and view limits set on the Environment level, Navigate to an environment’s details page and click on the “Limits” Tab. Here you can configure the limits for this specific environment’s servers and resources, as well as view overall utilization toward those limits.

   

Resource Handler Compute Limits

1. On the Resource Handler level, the administrator is able to configure limits based on compute resources only, not including rates. To configure these, navigate to the Resource Handler’s details page, and click on the “Compute Limits” Tab. Here you can configure the limits as well as view utilization of those resources. As the bars progress toward the limit, they are color coded compared to the overall utilization of that limit.

   

Best Practice

In most CloudBolt environments, there should be Higher limits from Resource Handler > Environment > Group, as there are generally multiple Groups with access to an environment, and multiple Environments with connections through a Resource Handler. Once Again, if the limit is surpassed on any of these levels, the build will not provision, but rather be put into an “awaiting approval” status, allowing administrators to proceed if necessary.