What will this infrastructure cost on AWS, Azure or GCP?

Questions CTOs ask

How do you estimate cloud infrastructure costs?

Cloud cost estimation involves calculating costs across four categories: compute (instance type, hours, autoscaling range), storage (volume size, IOPS requirements, backup retention), networking (data transfer between regions, egress to internet, load balancer hours), and managed services (databases, load balancers, CDN, monitoring — the categories this estimator prices; add caches, queues and serverless spend yourself). Use on-demand pricing for initial estimates, then model savings plans or reserved instances for production budgets. Always include a 15-25% buffer for overlooked services like monitoring, logging, and DNS.

How do you reduce cloud costs without impacting performance?

The highest-impact cost reduction strategies are right-sizing instances based on actual utilization data (provisioning is usually set from a worst-case guess made once and never revisited), purchasing reserved capacity or savings plans for predictable workloads (30-60% savings), implementing autoscaling for variable workloads, using spot/preemptible instances for fault-tolerant batch processing (60-90% savings), and cleaning up unused resources (unattached volumes, idle load balancers, old snapshots). A structured FinOps practice pays for itself mostly by making the spend visible to the people who cause it.