Departments will fund their own apps in a shared landing zone. Leadership wants showback from day one of each new solution. What must architects implement at launch?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Showback needs nametags on the gear from minute one—department, app, environment. Untagged piles at year-end become a forensic nightmare, not a finance report.
Full Explanation
Department-funded apps in a shared landing zone need showback from day one, which requires a mandatory tagging taxonomy—department, application, environment—enforced at resource launch. Consistent tags let Cost Explorer, Budgets, and CUR allocate spend to the owning department instead of leaving finance with an unattributed pile. The design works because multi-account visibility is a data problem solved at create time; retroactive archaeology is slow and incomplete. Allowing untagged production resources indefinitely and allocating from memory at year end fails as forensic fiction, not showback. Tagging only the Organizations management account root while leaving workload accounts untagged fails conceptually—most spend lives in workload accounts. Prohibiting all resource tags because of supposed API latency SLA impact fails on facts: tags are a standard expenditure-awareness control and do not meaningfully violate application SLAs. Exam caveat: tags need SCPs or policy enforcement and a living taxonomy; optional guidelines without enforcement decay within months in busy municipal orgs. Operational check: publish the required tag keys, enforce them with launch policies or IaC checks, generate a Cost Explorer grouped-by-department report for the first billing cycle, and escalate any production untagged spend above a small threshold.