We moved from showback to chargeback so that consumption would appear in the budget of the team causing it. The stated aim was to make cost visible to the people making technical decisions, and in that narrow sense it worked immediately. It also changed behaviour in four ways we had not intended, and three of them made the organisation worse.
Teams stopped requesting their own test environments and started sharing one, which saved a modest amount of money and produced a schedule conflict that eventually became a production incident. One group moved a small workload into an unmanaged account outside our tenancy because our internal rate was higher than the public list price of the same service, which it was, because our rate carried allocated overhead. Another turned off non-production logging, which was cheap for them and expensive for us the next time we had to investigate something. And a team declined a resilient configuration, correctly noting that the second copy doubled their line and that no business owner had ever been asked to fund resilience.
None of those decisions were unreasonable from where the team sat. They were the predictable response to the price list we published.
What we kept is the visibility, which genuinely improved conversations about waste. What we changed is what carries a price. Anything we mandate in the name of a standard, backup, logging, retention, the resilient configuration, is now funded centrally, because charging a team for compliance with our own policy is asking them to buy something they did not choose. What teams control and can vary, compute they can size and switch off, storage they can tier, is charged and shown weekly. The rate build-up is published so that anyone can argue with it, and several people have, usefully.
The general point is the one I wish I had understood before we started. Any number attached to a team's budget stops being information and becomes an instruction. Ours told people, without anyone intending it, that being careful was expensive and being invisible was cheap.
– Serguey Shinder
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