this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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Not sure what is hard in it - you need consistent tagging, and that by itself gives you a lot of mileage in cost explorer.
There's a lot of overlap of features. For example, we have a serverless function that does one thing for a dozen different departments, as well as for affiliates. Right now, our solution is just to say its part of the "operating expenses" bucket, which is our black box of things that just need to be paid.
The solution to fix this would be to split the function as separate instances, to get cleaner tag data.
But now you have separate instances of the same code and everything is even less efficient/effective, and significantly more overhead for "cleaner" tagging.
The serverless function is a extreme tiny example. Multiply that by bigger projects/critical architecture/etc.
For our company, we accept not really knowing the exact details, because the cost of getting that clarity is a magnitude more work for little gain.
My take is that it’s already your systems feature, rather than admins responsibility. If you treat departments like customers, you’d find a good way to spread the costs. If something is just a „common infrastructure”, you will always find something that makes costs that doesn’t have an easy way to track who triggered that - because you don’t pass enough information with it.
That doesn't work in all cases. I've recently come across two examples where we had a hard time explaining our costs even though we extensively tag and even have fine-grained AWS accounts:
Not only is that free, but I can't imagine a better alternative. And they would have the same issue with allocation on prem. WithOUT tagging and Cost Explorer.