Engineering integrations
Executive Summary
Traditional FinOps systems rely heavily on manual resource tagging, which creates operational friction, governance overhead, and engineering resistance. This article provides a step-by-step guide showing DevOps and Platform teams how to deploy a no-tagging runtime attribution system.
The deployment is zero-code, non-disruptive, and eliminates FinOps maintenance debt. By using lightweight kernel-level telemetry (eBPF) and automatic environment metadata discovery, organizations can achieve immediate, high-fidelity cost visibility that enables chargeback and showback over time, all while preserving the integrity of existing CI/CD pipelines and optional tags.
Core Thesis: Decoupling Cost Attribution from Engineering Friction
For years, cost attribution in the cloud has been synonymous with one word: tagging. The resulting complexity – heavy governance schemas, mandatory code changes, and tedious maintenance cycles is the single biggest reason engineering teams resist FinOps adoption. Engineering teams don’t resist cost visibility. They resist operational friction and disruptive integration work.
This article demystifies the deployment of a modern, no-tagging runtime attribution system. By detailing the step-by-step process, we demonstrate that cost attribution doesn’t have to be a source of burden. It can be a lightweight, non-disruptive, and natural fit for modern, cloud-native environments.
1. Step 1: Deployment; The Zero-Code Installation
The initial deployment phase is the most critical moment for proving value . If integration is complex or disruptive, adoptions stalls before insights are delivered. . The central promise of a no-tagging system is a zero-code guarantee for application engineers.
Zero-Code and Zero-Friction
The first step is simply installing the attribution sensor. This phase is handled entirely by the Platform or DevOps team and requires absolutely zero modification to application code, configuration files, service manifests, or CI/CD pipelines.
The deployment model is determined by your infrastructure:
- Node-Level Daemonset (eBPF): For Kubernetes environments, the most common and least intrusive method involves deploying a lightweight agent (often leveraging eBPF technology) as a daemonset across your worker nodes. This agent operates at the kernel level, observing resource consumption and network activity without touching the application layer.
- Agent Deployment: For traditional VMs or IaaS, a small, eBPF agent is installed on the host.
- Serverless: For serverless as Lambda, ECS and ECS Fargate integration is achieved via side car or layer methodologies to capture traffic and usage metadata.
By choosing one of these methods, the platform team achieves visibility across the entire infrastructure with minimal operational risk and no downtime.
2. Step 2: Runtime Data Collection, Automatic Discovery and Coexistence
Once deployed, the system immediately begins collecting the runtime signal data required for accurate cost attribution. This is where no-tagging fundamentally differs from traditional FinOps and cost attribution systems.
Data Source: Kernel-Level Telemetry over Manual Inputs
The system relies on lightweight, low-overhead methods to observe resource consumption. eBPF telemetry, based on the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), provides a highly efficient mechanism for capturing CPU, memory, and I/O utilization directly from the kernel. This enables the system to determine precise resource consumption for every process, container, or function.
The Coexistence of Tags
A common concern during transition is: “Do we have to delete all our existing tags?” The answer is a resounding no.
The shift to a no-tagging model does not require removing existing, manually-applied tags. The Attribute system is intelligently designed to be a superset of cost data. It will see and ingest your existing tags (such as environment:prod or team:finance), but it does not rely on them for its core attribution logic.
This is a critical differentiator: teams gain automatic accuracy while preserving existing reporting structures. Furthermore, these existing tags can be utilized as optional grouping attributes for specialized reporting, offering flexibility without compromising the system’s fundamental automation.
3. Step 3: Operational Simplicity and CI/CD Integrity
The final step is realizing the long-term operational gain. Since the system relies on immutable, intrinsic environment metadata (like Kubernetes namespace, service name, or deployment ID) rather than mutable, human-applied tags, the entire FinOps maintenance burden vanishes.
CI/CD Integration and FinOps Debt Elimination
- Non-Gating Deployment: The deployment process is non-gating, ensuring your existing CI/CD pipelines remain fast and unbroken. New services are automatically recognized and attributed the moment they are deployed into the runtime environment.
- No Tagging Updates During Refactors: When a team refactors a service or updates a deployment, the underlying metadata the attribution system relies on remains consistent, meaning there is no FinOps debt to clean up.
- No Dependency on Engineering: Engineers are freed from having to constantly check, fix, or update tags. The platform team maintains high-fidelity cost data without dedicating cycles to manual governance or cleanup.
The Platform Team Win
This deployment model empowers the Platform and DevOps teams by providing. instant, high-fidelity, and actionable cost data for chargeback or accurate showback reporting. This allows them to focus on true infrastructure optimization and ROI without being distracted by the thankless job of being the “FinOps governance police.”
Outcome
A no-tagging deployment proves that FinOps can be lightweight and invisible to development teams. By eliminating the friction and manual labor of traditional tagging, it delivers the accurate, timely data needed for optimization, making it the only truly viable model for modern cloud-native enterprises.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What access and permissions are required to deploy a no-tagging attribution system?
Deployment typically requires standard platform-level permissions only. For Kubernetes environments, this means the ability to deploy a daemonset with limited kernel visibility on worker nodes. No application-level permissions, service account changes, or CI/CD pipeline access are required. From a DevOps perspective, this keeps the blast radius small and aligns with least-privilege principles.
How does a no-tagging system coexist with existing tagging standards and governance?
A no-tagging system does not replace or invalidate existing tags. Instead, it operates independently of them for core attribution logic. Existing tags such as environment, team, or cost center can still be ingested and used as optional grouping dimensions for reporting. This allows platform teams to modernize cost attribution without disrupting current governance models or downstream reporting dependencies.
What happens when services are refactored, scaled, or redeployed?
Nothing breaks. Because attribution is based on runtime signals and immutable environment metadata such as namespaces, service identities, and network relationships, refactors and redeployments do not require any FinOps updates. New services are automatically discovered at runtime, and scaled or ephemeral workloads are attributed correctly the moment they execute, eliminating FinOps maintenance debt during architectural changes.
How does this deployment model affect CI/CD pipelines and release velocity?
It does not affect them at all. The deployment is non-gating and completely decoupled from CI/CD workflows. No tagging enforcement, validation steps, or policy checks are added to pipelines. From a DevOps standpoint, this preserves release velocity while still ensuring that cost attribution remains accurate from the first request a service handles in production.