How do you aim to attribute cost for multi-tenant services like databases?
For example, if I have a database costing $100/m, and 4 equal sized customers (by data volume, compute, requests), you could say that each is costing $25/m. However if I'm over provisioned by 50%, then an incremental user is only actually $12.50. To understand this difference requires understanding resource utilisation, which particularly for compute can be really hard. There's also a difference between desired headroom (for redundancy) and undesired headroom (due to inefficiencies), and these will be nuanced per company or service deployment.
This could also be taken in reverse – rather than the cost for an incremental user, the savings from removing a user. Given 2x $100/m databases with 2 customers, one accounting for 60% and one for 40%, losing the larger one would allow a 50% reduction on cost, but losing the smaller one would not.
What's your thinking here? Are you trying to communicate the incremental cost of a user? Are you trying to communicate the cost of a user against the current infrastructure, whatever that infrastructure might be?
For example, if I have a database costing $100/m, and 4 equal sized customers (by data volume, compute, requests), you could say that each is costing $25/m. However if I'm over provisioned by 50%, then an incremental user is only actually $12.50. To understand this difference requires understanding resource utilisation, which particularly for compute can be really hard. There's also a difference between desired headroom (for redundancy) and undesired headroom (due to inefficiencies), and these will be nuanced per company or service deployment.
This could also be taken in reverse – rather than the cost for an incremental user, the savings from removing a user. Given 2x $100/m databases with 2 customers, one accounting for 60% and one for 40%, losing the larger one would allow a 50% reduction on cost, but losing the smaller one would not.
What's your thinking here? Are you trying to communicate the incremental cost of a user? Are you trying to communicate the cost of a user against the current infrastructure, whatever that infrastructure might be?