How HiFX built DBSteward to turn a single shared-instance bill into a defensible per-database charge back.
If you run more than one database on a shared cloud instance, you already know this problem even if you’ve never named it. The bill arrives. It’s correct. And it’s completely useless for the one question everyone keeps asking: who actually used this?
The problem: cloud bills are blind below the instance line
AWS RDS — and most managed database services — bill at the instance level. A single shared SQL Server instance shows up as one line item on your bill, no matter whether it’s hosting two databases or twenty. The cloud provider has no idea that AcmeSales, AcmeInventory, AcmeHR, and AcmePayroll are four different teams with four different budgets. To AWS, they’re one tenant of one box, and the box costs what the box costs.
For a lot of organizations this is fine right up until it isn’t. The moment it stops being fine usually looks like one of these:
