When you look at a cloud bill, you are looking at the combined output of decisions made by developers, platform engineers, and SREs across your organization. With the rapid adoption of generative AI workloads, developers also directly drive model inference, token usage, and dynamic resource consumption. Because engineering choices directly dictate cloud and AI spend, democratizing cost accountability is key to operationalizing a successful FinOps program.
In traditional setups, central FinOps or finance teams receive monthly bills, spot anomalies and potential optimization opportunities, and spend weeks chasing engineering teams to investigate and make adjustments. True accountability requires attributing spend directly back to the teams building infrastructure and applications. The goal is to empower these teams to make informed decisions about cost, and proactively optimize spend for the resources they own. To do this, we must map cost in the same way engineering teams map ownership: to the specific services that they maintain.
We’re excited to announce that Wiz Cloud Cost is now supported in the Wiz Service Catalog, bridging the gap between FinOps and technical service owners by automatically mapping cloud and AI spend to services.
Automating Cost Allocation with the Service Catalog
To establish cost ownership, traditional FinOps solutions rely heavily on virtual tagging, which allows FinOps teams to allocate, label, and group spend without physically adding or editing resource tags. Virtual tagging gives FinOps teams flexibility, but requires many cycles crafting complex, manual mapping rules to allocate individual billing line items to teams. It satisfies finance showback, but doesn’t map to the way development teams think about ownership, and it doesn’t include the resource ownership needed to drive action on cost optimization opportunities.
The Wiz Service Catalog automatically groups related cloud resources into services: logical units that reflect how teams build and run applications. The Service Catalog first groups resources based on resource tags and uses the Wiz graph and other relationship context to understand the full scope of a service. Wiz then maps cost to services, delivering service-level allocation without writing a single rule.
In the Cost Explorer you can filter or group by Application Service to see how costs break down across services and get a picture of top services by cost. Bringing services into the Cost Explorer delivers application-level context, connecting spend directly to the product features driving business value.
More Ways to Allocate Cost in Wiz: Projects and Services
Services are just one way that Wiz helps teams drive cost attribution. To build an effective showback model, you need a framework that mirrors both your application architecture and organizational hierarchy. Service Catalog covers the first, and Projects cover the latter. Here’s how they work together:
Wiz Projects (Macro-Level Organization Structure): Projects represent your overarching organizational structure and are defined at the account level by grouping cloud subscriptions or accounts under a single operational boundary. Projects should be used to define ownership at the business unit, team, or product level, and are used to define Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) boundaries in Wiz.
Wiz Service Catalog (Micro-Level Architecture): Service Catalog isolates individual application features or microservices such as a “Checkout API” or “Authentication Service.” Services use lower-level tag mapping and cloud graph context to group resources into logical application components.
Driving Cost Accountability with Service Ownership
While FinOps users and team leads care about the big picture of where spend is going across all services, developers care about maintaining the overall health and performance of the services they own.
The Wiz Service Catalog brings multiple dimensions of service health together in one view. In the services drawer you can see the service architecture graph, along with service insights including security findings, end of life technologies, and cost optimization opportunities. Developers can streamline prioritization and remediation taking this holistic context into account, for example, upgrading an end of life (EOL) technology that is inflating costs due to extended support fees, or simply deleting an idle resource that has a critical vulnerability, instead of patching.
To move from visibility to true cost accountability, you can drive automation and cost alerting to service owners in their own workflows:
1. Assign service owners: Add ownership assignment to services directly in the Service Catalog. Ownership mapping can be streamlined using service workflows, leveraging the built-in service owner suggestion flow, or using integration with developer platforms like Backstage to pull owners automatically.
2. Create cost anomaly monitors for services: Create a new cost monitor anomaly rule and filter to service to detect and alert on anomalous service cost spikes.
3. Send scheduled reports for optimization opportunities: Create scheduled reports to send all cost optimization opportunities associated with a service to service owners on a weekly (or custom) basis.
By automating alerts to developers in their own workflows, and giving them the full context they need to take action on cost alerts and optimization recommendations, you can move to a democratized FinOps operating model where the FinOps leads are no longer a bottleneck.
Connecting AI Spend to Business Value with Services
As organizations scale generative AI, it’s critical for teams to attribute AI spend to specific business value it is driving. Unlike traditional compute, AI costs are driven dynamically by model inference, API token consumption, and developer usage. Without granular attribution to application features, it’s impossible for FinOps and engineering leaders to understand which applications are driving AI spend and whether that spend translates to tangible business value.
We are excited to announce expanded cost attribution capabilities for AWS Bedrock. Wiz now traces Bedrock consumption costs directly back to specific IAM principals, such as developer execution roles or service accounts. By mapping these principals directly to their respective services in the Service Catalog, Wiz puts AI consumption in the direct context of the application features driving it.
What’s Next
Cost attribution in the Service Catalog is a first step towards enabling unit economics. By attributing cloud infrastructure and AI inference costs directly to discrete application services, Wiz enables FinOps leads to partner with product and finance teams to calculate real margins, establish accurate chargeback models, and evaluate the ROI of feature additions.
To enable this, we are doubling down on AI cost attribution to give organizations full visibility into AI spend across model providers. Beyond AWS Bedrock, we are actively expanding principal-level tracking and context mapping across additional AI providers.
Ready to democratize cloud cost management across your engineering teams? Request a demo of Wiz Cloud Cost to see it in action. Existing Wiz customers can enable a 30-day trial of Wiz Cloud Cost directly from the Licenses page in Wiz today to start attributing cloud and AI spend to services.
