Modeling discounts and credits in a way that makes sense to all users of billing data

[joshk0]

Description

I am curious about how credits and discounts will be modeled in FOCUS. It is a topic that comes up when we discuss topics like gross cost, net cost, invoice cost, amortized etc. and it feels uncomfortable to discuss them without knowing what will be done to model credits and discounts.

Context

• engineers are often interested in usage based gross cost
• finance team is often interested in fully loaded net cost (with the credits and discounts)
• engineers are often interested in amortized costs (to smooth out spikey once-a-month costs)
• engineers are interested in credits and discounts related to decisions they have made, as opposed to credits and discounts related to finance org-wide optimizations such as EDP

paper cuts i've seen in other clouds:

• AWS implementation of EDP may discount to zero random line items until a high water mark is reached. THen other line items are not discounted to zero. when finance team looks at fully loaded cost per team, they need to remove this discount because of the way line items are selected to be zeroed. some teams will appear to have spent less artificially.
• org wide credits may hide gross usage that engineers want to see. like the above, once they expire, suddenly a user can be surprised about this usage because they have been using a net cost view.

The solution for the nexus of credits and charges and discounts should prescribe an answer for these unusual situations that could hopefully be taken up by major CSPs and help clear the fog in the future.

discussions for:

• billed cost
• net amortized cost

[udam-f2]

@joshk0 Is this something you can lead the discussion on with the community? Slack, Member meetings, and FOCUS feedback sessions are all options for engaging.