Cloud Resource Mapping

Cost Allocation is where you connect your cloud infrastructure to your business structure. Every dollar of cloud 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 account or project 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 cloud 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 cloud service — Compute, Database & Storage, Networking, AI & Analytics. Useful for understanding which service families (AWS or GCP) 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 tags or labels — if your engineering teams tag their AWS resources or label their GCP resources, you can create cost layers that reflect those tags/labels, 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 linked AWS accounts or GCP projects are always the starting point. In the middle, breakdown dimensions are flexible: by default this is Product Code (the AWS or GCP services within each account/project), 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 cloud 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 node in the Sankey diagram — a linked account, a service, or a value in a breakdown column — to open a popup scoped to that node. What the popup offers depends on the node’s current state: Unassigned node, with mapped siblings If a node hasn’t been assigned yet but the other nodes in its column have, the popup flags it — Unassigned while siblings are mapped — and offers three actions:

• Magic Assign this node — runs the same auto-classification used by Help me map on just this node.
• Split by dimension… — break this node’s spend down further before assigning. See “Splitting by dimension” below.
• Assign to layer… — opens the Assign to Cost Layer picker described below.

Already-assigned node Clicking a node that’s already mapped opens a different set of actions — Split by service (or by whichever dimension is active in that column), Reassign to layer…, and Unassign. Assign to Cost Layer picker Choosing Assign to layer… or Reassign to layer… opens the same picker either way: your full cost layer tree with a search field. Click any leaf layer to assign the node 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. Splitting by dimension Split by dimension… opens a list of cloud dimensions (e.g. Service Category, Region) and tags/cost categories, each with a small preview of how the node’s spend breaks down across its values. Pick one and Cloud Capital inserts it as a new column in the canvas, splitting the node into one sub-node per value — each of which gets its own popup so you can keep assigning, or split again by a different dimension. This is the fastest way to clear unallocated spend that doesn’t map cleanly by service alone — you can drill into a whole linked account, a grouped “N small items” bucket, or a single service, at any level, by whatever dimension actually separates it out.

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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