CostFormation: Allocating Shared Costs

Custom Dimensions allow you to organize your cloud costs by grouping resources together in ways that make the most sense for your business. However, when a resource is shared by multiple systems, such as customers, products or tenants, it becomes necessary to split the cost across multiple resources. For example, an RDS database that is used by multiple products shouldn't have its cost entirely assigned to only one product.

Allocating this cost can be accomplished by using Allocation Dimensions.

Allocation Dimensions

An Allocation Dimension is a type of CloudZero Custom Dimension created using the CostFormation definition language. Today there are two types of Allocation Dimensions:

Rules Allocation Dimensions

These dimensions are used to split shared costs across the elements of another dimension. For example, splitting the cost of a shared database among the products using the database, proportional to the products' relative costs. Or, splitting a system-wide operational cost evenly across a number of engineering teams. Rules Allocation Dimensions are a great and easy way to quickly split costs to increase your cloud cost visibility without further engineering work.

Telemetry Allocation Dimensions

These dimensions are used to split shared costs among different target elements based on additional telemetry data provided to the CloudZero platform. Telemetry Allocation Dimensions are a great choice when you need granular control over how the shared costs are split. For example, if you need to split the cost according to a utilization metric.

Use Cases

The following additional sections can be used to learn more about Allocation Dimensions.

The Split Shared Costs Using Rules section splits a shared cost using a proportional rules allocation dimension, which allows us to split the shared cost relative to other costs in another dimension.
The Split Shared Costs Using Telemetry section splits a shared cost into new elements using a telemetry stream.
The Combining Dedicated & Shared Cost section reviews how to combine the split shared cost with an existing dedicated cost.