Split Shared Costs Using Telemetry

This detailed guide will walk through how to split shared costs using telemetry data via Explicit Allocation dimensions in CostFormation. Fear not, if any of those terms are unfamiliar they will be soon enough.

The problem to solve

For the purposes of this exercise, we will assume we're working for a SaaS business that thinks of itself as a collection of Products and so, from a cost of goods sold (COGS) perspective, this business needs to understand the cost of each product.

The challenge we face is that our business has some RDS storage costs that should be allocated between these products based on how much storage each product uses. We will solve this problem by using Telemetry Streams to allocate those RDS storage costs to Products and improve the accuracy of our cost reporting from a COGS perspective.

What we'll be building

For a sneak peak at the complete CloudFormation and telemetry records jump to the end now. The next steps will go over the various parts of this in detail.