Comparison
Resource taggingvsShowback
Resource tagging
you tried to answer which team spends what and forty percent of the bill was in a bucket labelled untagged.
Attaching structured metadata — owner, service, environment, cost centre — to every resource, so cost and inventory can be grouped by something meaningful. It is the precondition for every other cost practice and it is only achievable by enforcement at creation, since retrospective tagging never finishes. Policy that rejects untagged resources is the difference between a tagging standard and a tagging aspiration.
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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.
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