Understanding Allocation Hierarchy

amberflo offers multiple ways to allocate cloud and infrastructure costs to business units these methods work together in a prioritized hierarchy to give you both control and flexibility this page explains how the different types of allocation interact and how to use them together effectively allocation hierarchy cost allocation in amberflo is resolved using the following order of precedence automatic allocation (rules based) manual allocation (percentage based) equal allocation of remaining costs each method builds on the one before it once costs are allocated at a higher level, they are considered final and are not modified by methods lower in the hierarchy you can update any allocation method at any time, and the hierarchy will be reapplied accordingly 1\ automatic allocation automatic allocation uses rules to assign costs to business units based on metadata such as tag keys and values (e g , applicationid=a3d452, env=prod) service name region subaccount id (e g , aws subaccount, azure subscription) resource id you can create complex rules by combining these fields for example assign all amazon cloudfront costs in us east 1 where the tag env=prod to the production business unit automatic rules are the first to be evaluated and take precedence over all other allocation methods you can think of them as programmatic mappings based on consistent tagging or service usage 2\ manual allocation manual allocation allows you to directly assign percentages of a specific service’s cost to one or more business units this is useful when you know how costs should be distributed, but cannot capture that logic in automatic rules for example allocate 50% of amazon ec2 to the engineering business unit and 50% to the sales business unit manual allocations apply only to the remaining unallocated portion of each service after automatic rules have been evaluated however, if you later define an automatic rule that overlaps with a manual allocation, the automatic rule will take priority 3\ equal allocation of remaining costs after automatic and manual allocations are applied, you may still have costs that are unallocated you can choose to evenly distribute these remaining costs across all business units by enabling equal allocation this approach is especially useful when there is no tagging or metadata available for the remaining services you want to ensure 100% cost allocation you need a default fallback strategy while refining more granular rules when enabled, equal allocation divides the remaining costs equally across all current business units ⚠️ note if you add a new business unit later, you will need to re apply equal allocation to include it in the distribution updating allocations over time you can update any part of your allocation strategy at any time add or modify automatic rules as tagging improves adjust manual allocation percentages when cost distributions change re run equal allocation after structural changes, such as new business units amberflo will always reapply the hierarchy automatic rules first manual allocations next equal allocation last this ensures that your most precise allocation rules are honored first, while still guaranteeing that no cost goes unallocated summary amberflo gives you the flexibility to allocate costs in whatever way makes the most sense for your organization whether you’re using rich metadata to apply rules, manually assigning known splits, or simply dividing what’s left, you can always achieve a fully attributed view of your cloud and infrastructure spend