Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
4 to work through
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intermediate Multiple choice
At 09:10 a checkout service starts returning 503s. Its autoscaler has taken the fleet from 30 to 180 pods in twenty minutes, CPU per pod sits at 22%, and the database reports connection waits. That day's compute bill is four times normal and traffic is up only 30%. Which explanation fits every symptom?
3 min answer -
advanced
A platform's accelerator fleet reports high utilisation, yet throughput per accelerator is far below the hardware's capability. Where does the waste usually hide?
2 min answer -
advanced
A team migrates its stateless serving fleet to an ARM instance family for roughly 20% better price-performance on paper. What has it given up, and when does that bill arrive?
2 min answer -
advanced
Which compute cost lever has the largest payoff, and why is it the one teams attempt last?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Compute Optimisation
Reducing compute spend through sizing, scheduling, purchasing model and architecture — in increasing order of both effort and payoff.
practiceInstance Family Selection
Matching a workload's resource profile to a machine type designed for it, which is frequently a larger saving than reducing size.
Neighbouring topics
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Reserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.
Spot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
Unit Economics
Cost per request, per tenant, per transaction — the actionable number.
Cost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
Storage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
Network & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Rightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand rather than to a guess.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
Showback & Chargeback
Making teams see, or own, the cost of what they run.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Licence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
Waste Elimination
Idle environments, orphaned volumes, forgotten instances, dead data.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.