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Organize Spend with Pools

Pools are how KOSTRA models your organization. A pool represents a team, project, business unit, or budget, and every resource can belong to one. Once your estate is organized into pools, cost becomes accountable: you can see who spends what, set budgets per pool, and run chargeback. This guide shows how to build that structure.

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Understand the pool model

Pools are hierarchical. A top-level pool can contain sub-pools, mirroring how your organization is actually structured — for example, a business unit containing several teams, each containing projects. KOSTRA supports pool purposes such as budget, business unit, team, project, CI/CD, and others, so the structure reads naturally to finance and engineering alike. A well-designed pool tree is the foundation for everything downstream: budgets, allocation rules, chargeback, and per-pool recommendations exclusions all reference it.

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Create your pool structure

  1. In the left navigation, open Pools.
  2. Create a top-level pool that represents your organization or a major business unit.
  3. Add sub-pools beneath it for teams and projects, choosing a purpose that reflects each.
  4. Repeat until the tree matches how you want to account for spend.
Start simple. A shallow tree that everyone understands is more useful than a deep one that no one maintains.

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Assign resources to pools

Resources need to be assigned to the right pool for cost to be attributed correctly. KOSTRA supports two approaches:
  • Automatic assignment rules. Define rules that place resources into pools based on attributes such as name patterns, tags, cloud, region, or resource type. New resources are then assigned automatically as they are discovered — the scalable approach for a growing estate.
  • Manual assignment. Assign an individual resource to a pool directly from the Resources view when a rule does not cover it.
Automatic rules do the heavy lifting; manual assignment handles the exceptions.

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Create an assignment rule

  1. Open Resources and locate the assignment-rules area, or start from a resource you want to route.
  2. Define the condition — for example, resource name starts with a prefix, or a specific tag exists with a given value.
  3. Choose the target pool.
  4. Save the rule. Matching resources are assigned to the pool going forward.
Conditions can be combined so a rule is as specific as you need — for example, resources in a particular Huawei Cloud region whose name contains a project code.

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Keep the structure healthy

  • Review unassigned resources regularly. Resources with no pool cannot be charged back; a periodic sweep keeps attribution complete.
  • Tag at the source. Consistent tagging in your clouds makes assignment rules far more reliable. Consider a tagging policy so the structure stays clean.
  • Evolve the tree deliberately. Reorganize pools as teams change, but avoid churning the structure so often that historical reporting becomes hard to read.

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What pools unlock

With resources in the right pools you can:
  • View spend by pool in Cost Explorer.
  • Set budgets and alerts per pool.
  • Attribute shared and direct spend with Allocation Rules and produce a Chargeback Report.