Discovery Questions
- •How is cloud cost data ingested and processed (CUR, billing exports)?
- •What percentage of spend is accurately tagged and allocated?
- •How do teams view their own cost data (dashboards, reports, alerts)?
- •Are showback or chargeback models in place?
- •How frequently is cost data refreshed and reviewed?
- •What governance exists for tagging standards and enforcement?
Evidence to Collect
- •CUR pipeline architecture
- •Tagging policy documentation
- •Cost dashboards and reports
- •Allocation accuracy metrics
Implementation Patterns
CUR Pipeline Architecture
Build scalable pipelines to ingest, transform, and query AWS Cost and Usage Reports at scale.
AWS AthenaS3GlueDatabricksSnowflake
Steps
- Enable CUR exports to S3 with hourly or daily granularity.
- Set up Glue crawlers or Athena tables for queryable cost data.
- Build transformation jobs to normalize and enrich with business context.
- Create dashboards for team-level and service-level cost views.
- Automate anomaly detection alerts for spend spikes.
Tagging Governance Program
Enforce consistent tagging across accounts and resources for accurate allocation.
AWS ConfigTag PoliciesOPATerraform
Steps
- Define mandatory tags (cost-center, team, environment, service).
- Implement tag policies at the organization level.
- Run compliance scans and report on untagged resources.
- Integrate tag enforcement into CI/CD and IaC pipelines.
- Track allocation accuracy and target 99%+ coverage.