Definition
Showback is a cloud financial management practice that allocates cloud costs to the teams or business units responsible for incurring them. It involves reporting on resource consumption and associated expenses, providing transparency into where cloud spending is happening. This practice helps foster accountability and awareness of cloud costs among engineering and product teams. For instance, a development team might receive a monthly report detailing their specific spending on compute instances, storage, and network egress. Showback differs from chargeback in that it is informational rather than a mandatory billing mechanism. This concept is frequently assessed on cloud practitioner and FinOps focused certifications.