Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
3 to work through
-
intermediate
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?
2 min answer -
intermediate
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?
2 min answer -
advanced
A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?
2 min answer
11 terms in this topic
Architecture Cost Model
A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
practiceChargeback and Showback
Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
conceptCloud Pricing Models
The purchase options for cloud compute — on-demand, committed use, and spot — which differ by up to 90% for identical hardware.
metricCost per Request
The fully-loaded infrastructure cost of serving one request, and the unit that makes architectural cost decisions comparable.
conceptCost vs Reliability Trade-off
The non-linear relationship between availability and spend, which makes each additional nine roughly an order of magnitude more expensive.
case-studyDropbox'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 mil…
conceptEgress 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.
practiceFinOps
The practice of giving engineering teams visibility into and accountability for the cost of what they build and run.
practiceRightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand, rather than to the guess made when they were created.
practiceStorage Tiering
Moving data between access tiers as it cools, so rarely-read data is not paying hot-storage prices.
metricTotal Cost of Ownership
The full lifetime cost of a capability, including the people, operations, upgrades and exit that a licence comparison leaves out.
Neighbouring topics
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
No content yetCloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
No content yetReserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.
No content yetSpot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
No content yetUnit Economics
Cost per request, per tenant, per transaction — the actionable number.
No content yetCost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
No content yetStorage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
No content yetNetwork & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
No content yetRightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand rather than to a guess.
No content yetCost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
No content yetShowback & Chargeback
Making teams see, or own, the cost of what they run.
No content yetArchitecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
No content yetCost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
No content yetObservability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
No content yetLicence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
No content yetFinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
No content yetWaste Elimination
Idle environments, orphaned volumes, forgotten instances, dead data.
No content yetCost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.
No content yet