Cost Buckets

Cost buckets are the primary mechanism for organising and allocating cloud costs in Troposphere. They let you map your cloud spend to the structure that matters to your business – whether that is by team, project, environment, or cost center.

Hierarchical Structure#

Cost buckets can be nested to create a tree that mirrors your organisational structure. A top-level bucket might represent an engineering department, with child buckets for individual teams, and further children for specific services or environments. Costs roll up through the hierarchy, giving leadership visibility at every level.

Budget Modes#

Each cost bucket supports one of two budget modes:

• Own – the bucket has its own fixed budget that applies only to the costs directly assigned to it.
• Rollup – the bucket’s budget is the sum of its children’s budgets, automatically reflecting changes as child buckets are added or modified.

Assigning Costs#

Resources are associated with a bucket through three methods. You can assign an entire connection so every resource on it rolls into the bucket, assign individual resources directly for fine-grained control, or define tag-based filters that automatically capture any resource matching a given tag key/value – keeping the bucket up to date as your infrastructure evolves.

Budget Thresholds#

Each cost bucket defines its own set of budget thresholds. A threshold is a percentage of the bucket’s effective budget paired with a severity (Critical, High, Medium, Low, or Info). When the bucket’s spend crosses a threshold, Troposphere generates a budget alert at the matching severity so the responsible team can investigate before costs spiral further.