FinOps Case Study: Building a Cloud Cost Center at Qimai Technology

Qimai Technology, founded in 2018, provides SaaS solutions for over 2,000 offline chain brands, handling billions in transaction volume. Rapid business expansion led to a sharp increase in Alibaba Cloud usage across more than 30 services, but early cost management was insufficient, causing resource waste and budget strain.

To address these issues, Qimai launched a cost‑center project aimed at optimizing cloud resource allocation, providing real‑time cost analytics, and reducing unnecessary spending. Core challenges included mapping diverse cloud resources to departments, handling container‑based workloads that account for over 70% of deployments, and defining varied cost‑sharing rules for shared services such as databases, MQ, and CDN.

The solution involved three main components:

Using an open‑source CMDB to maintain mappings between bills and business units, establishing a hierarchy of SaaS → BU → Group → App and linking apps to cloud resources.

Leveraging Alibaba Cloud Managed ACK clusters with a mix of subscription‑based node pools and pay‑as‑you‑go elastic pools, and employing the ACK Cost V2 API (aligned with CNCF OpenCost) to calculate per‑application cost shares for container workloads.

Defining multi‑dimensional cost‑allocation strategies, including static ratios for hard‑to‑measure resources and dynamic ratios based on metrics such as TPS for MQ, URL visits for CDN, and cost_v3 for containers.

Daily, the cost center synchronizes full‑scale billing data, enriches each instance record with application, group, and department identifiers, and applies the appropriate allocation rule to split shared resource costs accurately.

The outcome is a transparent, fine‑grained cost view that aligns cloud spending with business value, demonstrating how FinOps practices can transform rapid, coarse‑grained expansion into disciplined, data‑driven cloud governance.