Comparison
ChargebackvsShowback
Chargeback
the spend actually lands on your team's budget, and now somebody senior cares about the idle staging cluster.
Charging infrastructure costs to the consuming team's budget for real. It aligns incentives far more forcefully than showback, and it imports real costs: teams begin optimising for their own bill rather than the whole, arguing about shared-cost allocation, and occasionally choosing worse architectures to avoid a chargeable line. Shared platform costs are where the arguments concentrate, since any allocation of them is arbitrary.
Full entry →Showback
each team is told what they spent last month, and nothing moves between budgets as a result.
Reporting infrastructure costs back to the teams that incurred them, without transferring the money. It is informational, which is both its weakness and the reason it is easy to introduce — no finance process changes and nobody has to defend a budget. In practice visibility alone moves the biggest, most obvious numbers and does very little about the long tail.
Full entry →