Finops

“Which topic is costing us?” is the question every platform team gets, and nobody can answer it cleanly. SaaS providers bill you at the cluster level. Your finance team wants a line item per team. Your product managers want to know if their pipeline is the expensive one. You have a Kafka cluster, a bill, and no bridge between them.

In Hindu tradition, Chitragupta is the deity who maintains a complete record of every being’s actions. The divine accountant. Fitting name for a system that tracks exactly who used what and how much it cost.

Presented at Confluent Current 2025 in New Orleans. Cloud billing for Kafka is opaque by default. You get one invoice, shared across every team, with no clear way to tell who’s driving costs. This talk walks through how to go from that to transparent, identity-level cost attribution, covering the tooling, the data model, and the organizational patterns that make chargebacks and showbacks actually work.

When multiple teams share a Confluent Cloud environment but a single CoE team manages everything, the billing question comes up fast: who’s actually using what, and how much does it cost?