The Art of CTO Cloud Cost Estimator calculates infrastructure costs across AWS, Azure, and GCP for compute, storage, networking, and managed services to support cloud migration and budgeting decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
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, caches, message queues, serverless invocations). 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 (most organizations over-provision by 40-60%), 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 typically reduces cloud spend by 20-35% in the first year.