Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
38 results for “FinOps Practice”
FinOps
The practice of giving engineering teams visibility into and accountability for the cost of what they build and run.
Architecture Cost Model
A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Chargeback and Showback
Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
Cloud Pricing Models
The purchase options for cloud compute — on-demand, committed use, and spot — which differ by up to 90% for identical hardware.
Cost per Request
The fully-loaded infrastructure cost of serving one request, and the unit that makes architectural cost decisions comparable.
Cost vs Reliability Trade-off
The non-linear relationship between availability and spend, which makes each additional nine roughly an order of magnitude more expensive.
Dropbox's Move Off S3
Dropbox moved the majority of its file storage off Amazon S3 onto custom infrastructure, reporting savings that its S-1 filing put at roughly $75 million over two years.
Egress Cost
The charge for moving data out of a cloud provider or across its zones and regions — usually the least-anticipated line on a cloud bill.
Egress Path Analysis
Tracing where data physically moves in an architecture, because transfer charges follow paths that appear nowhere on the diagram.
Rightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand, rather than to the guess made when they were created.
Storage Tiering
Moving data between access tiers as it cools, so rarely-read data is not paying hot-storage prices.
Total Cost of Ownership
The full lifetime cost of a capability, including the people, operations, upgrades and exit that a licence comparison leaves out.
A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?
What the interviewer is testing Whether cost is part of your architecture review or an afterthought handled by finance later, and whether you know the specific
Finance wants to cut cloud spend by committing to one-year and three-year reservations. What do you commit to, and what could go wrong?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can turn a blunt cost mandate into a portfolio decision with a stated risk, rather than either refusing it or over c
The cloud bill has tripled in six months while traffic grew 40%. How do you find out why, and what do you expect to find?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you approach cost with the same rigour as latency, and whether you know where cloud money actually goes. How to find out
FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Decision Practice
Thresholds, review, supersession and keeping the log alive.
Documentation Practice
Keeping documents close to the code and honest about staleness.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.
Cost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Licence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
Network & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Reserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.
Rightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand rather than to a guess.
Showback & Chargeback
Making teams see, or own, the cost of what they run.
Spot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
Storage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
Unit Economics
Cost per request, per tenant, per transaction — the actionable number.
Waste Elimination
Idle environments, orphaned volumes, forgotten instances, dead data.