Cloud Resource Mapping

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cloudcapital.co/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Cost Allocation is where you connect your cloud infrastructure to your business structure. Every dollar of AWS spend gets assigned to a Cost Layer — a named category that reflects how your organisation thinks about its costs. Once mapped, your forecast, savings analysis, and commitment proposals all work from that structure rather than raw AWS account data.

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Why Cost Layers matter

Cloud Capital starts every organisation with two top-level cost layers:

• Production (COGS) — infrastructure that directly supports your live product or service. From a finance perspective, this is Cost of Goods Sold: the cloud spend that scales with your revenue and belongs on your P&L as a direct cost of delivering your service.
• Non-Production (OpEx) — infrastructure used for development, staging, testing, and internal tooling. This is Operating Expenditure: necessary business cost, but not directly tied to serving customers.

This distinction matters to your finance team. COGS and OpEx are treated differently in financial reporting, margin analysis, and budgeting conversations. Mapping your cloud spend to these two categories from the start means Cloud Capital’s forecasts and savings proposals are grounded in the same financial structure your CFO and board use — not just a flat view of your AWS bill. Going deeper with sub-layers Two top-level layers are the minimum. Most organisations benefit from further structure beneath them, which you can add at any time. Common approaches include:

• By AWS service — Compute, Database & Storage, Networking, AI & Analytics. Useful for understanding which service families are driving cost growth, and for engineering teams who want to see their spend split by infrastructure type.
• By region — US East, EU West, APAC. Useful for organisations with regulatory, latency, or cost-allocation reasons to track spend by geography.
• By team or product using AWS tags — if your engineering teams tag their resources, you can create cost layers that reflect those tags, giving you per-team or per-product spend visibility directly in your forecast.
• By business line — Core Product, Data Pipeline, Internal Tools. Useful for companies with multiple products or revenue streams that want to understand cloud cost per product line.

You don’t need to set up all of this on day one. Start with Production / Non-Production, get your forecast running, and add granularity as your needs become clearer. See Cost Layers for full details on managing and refining your structure over time.

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Getting there

Navigate to Cost Allocation using the left sidebar, or click Cost Allocation at the top of the Cloud Provider Integrations page. The canvas shows a Sankey diagram flowing left to right. Linked Accounts sit on the left — your AWS accounts are always the starting point. In the middle, breakdown dimensions are flexible: by default this is Product Code (AWS services within each account), but the columns between accounts and cost layers can vary. Cost Layers — your business categories — appear on the right. Flow width represents spend volume. Colour indicates assignment status: green (assigned), amber (needs attention), peach (unallocated).

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Mapping your resources

When you open Cost Allocation, click the ? icon in the top-left of the canvas to open the mapping guide. You can take either path:

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Help me map (guided)

The guided flow walks through mapping in four steps. Cloud Capital suggests a cost layer structure based on your accounts and services — you review and adjust before anything is applied. Step 1 — Map your accounts Cloud Capital analyses your account names and suggests a cost layer structure — automatically grouping accounts into Production, Staging, or Security & Operations. If you have your own preferred structure, the suggestions are a starting point: every account can be overridden before anything is applied. The summary shows how many accounts landed in each suggested category. Expand Review or change assignments to see every account with its suggested category and a dropdown to change it. Step 2 — Organise production accounts (optional) If you have multiple production accounts representing distinct products, teams, or pipelines, you can group them into named sub-layers under Production here. Type a name and click Add layer. This step is optional — click Skip, keep it flat to leave all production accounts directly under Production and move on. Step 3 — Service cost breakdown Choose whether to split production spend by AWS service category:

• Yes, group by service — Cloud Capital creates sub-layers for Compute, Database & Storage, Networking & Delivery, and AI & Analytics under your selected cost layers. The preview at the bottom shows exactly which categories will be created under Production (COGS) and Non-Production (OpEx).
• No, keep it simple — production accounts map directly to their cost layer without service-level breakdown.

Use the checkboxes to select which cost layers get service sub-layers created beneath them. Step 4 — Review and apply A full summary shows all account assignments and the cost layer structure that will be created. Review it, then click Apply mapping to write the changes to the canvas.

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I’ll do it myself (manual)

Dismiss the guide and work directly on the canvas. Click any Product Code node in the middle column to open the Assign to Cost Layer picker. The picker shows your full cost layer tree with a search field. Click any leaf layer to assign that service to it. Hover any layer and click + to create a new child layer on the spot — useful if you want to add a sub-layer you didn’t set up in the guided flow.

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Canvas controls

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Toolbar

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Filters

The + / − buttons in the bottom-left corner zoom the canvas in and out. The icon below them resets to the default zoom.

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Saving your work

Changes are local until you click Save Changes in the toolbar. Navigate away without saving and your edits will be lost. Once saved, your Cost Layer assignments feed directly into your Cloud Capital forecast. The structure you create here becomes the foundation your forecast, savings analysis, and commitment proposals are all built on.

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What’s next