Cloud Cost Engineering and Open Source FinOps
Notes from the team building C3X. Cost estimation for Terraform, the economics of cloud infrastructure, and how to ship FinOps tooling without a SaaS gate.
ALB LCU cost explained: how load balancer capacity units bill you
An Application Load Balancer costs about $0.0225 per hour plus a per-LCU fee, and the LCU is the part that surprises people. It measures four dimensions and bills the highest one. Here is how LCUs work and how to keep them low.
NLB cost explained: Network Load Balancer pricing and NLCUs
A Network Load Balancer costs about $0.0225 per hour plus a per-NLCU fee, and like the ALB it bills on the highest of several dimensions. For TCP and UDP pass-through it is often cheaper than an ALB. Here is how NLB pricing works.
Route 53 health checks cost: the small fees behind DNS failover
Route 53 health checks cost $0.50 per month for AWS endpoints and $0.75 for external ones, with optional features adding $1 to $2 each. On their own they are cheap, but dozens of them with add-ons quietly add up. Here is the pricing.
CloudWatch Logs ingestion vs storage cost: where the money really goes
CloudWatch Logs charges about $0.50 per GB to ingest and only $0.03 per GB per month to store, so ingestion, not retention, is almost always the bigger bill. Understanding the split changes how you cut logging cost. Here is the breakdown.
CloudWatch dashboards cost: the $3 fee nobody budgets for
CloudWatch dashboards cost $3 per dashboard per month after the first three free, and API calls to render them add more. Teams that auto-generate a dashboard per service can rack up an unexpected line. Here is how dashboard pricing works.
KMS key cost vs request cost: which one dominates your bill
AWS KMS charges $1 per month per customer-managed key and $0.03 per 10,000 requests, so a few keys is trivial but a high-throughput app making millions of encrypt and decrypt calls can flip the bill to requests. Here is how to tell which side dominates.
Transit Gateway inter-region peering cost: connecting regions the expensive way
Transit Gateway inter-region peering lets you link regions through the AWS backbone, but you pay per-GB data processing on each side plus cross-region data transfer. For high-volume inter-region traffic the fees stack. Here is the cost breakdown.
Direct Connect data transfer savings: when the dedicated line pays off
Direct Connect adds port fees but slashes data transfer out to about $0.02 per GB versus $0.09 over the internet. For heavy, steady egress to your data center the savings can dwarf the port cost. Here is the break-even math.
Global Accelerator vs CloudFront cost: two edge services, two bills
Global Accelerator charges a fixed $0.025 per hour plus a per-GB premium, while CloudFront has no fixed fee and bills per GB and per request. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one wastes money. Here is the cost comparison.
VPC Flow Logs cost: the free feature with a delivery bill
VPC Flow Logs are free to enable, but you pay to deliver them: about $0.50 per GB to CloudWatch Logs or less to S3. On a busy VPC that ingestion cost can surprise you. Here is how flow log pricing actually works.
CloudTrail data events cost: why S3 and Lambda logging gets expensive
CloudTrail management events are largely free, but data events cost $0.10 per 100,000 events, and high-volume S3 or Lambda logging can generate billions of them. Here is how data event pricing works and how to keep it in check.
Public IPv4 address cost: the charge AWS added to every address
AWS now charges about $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address, in use or idle, adding roughly $3.65 per month per address. For fleets with hundreds of public IPs the total is real. Here is how the charge works and how to cut it.
SSM Parameter Store cost explained: free standard vs paid advanced
SSM Parameter Store standard parameters are free, while advanced parameters cost $0.05 each per month and higher-throughput API calls carry a fee. Knowing when you actually need advanced tier saves money over Secrets Manager. Here is the pricing.
Private IP vs public IP data transfer cost: the free path you might be missing
Traffic between resources over private IPs in the same AZ is free, but the same traffic over public or Elastic IPs is charged even within a region. Using the wrong address turns free traffic into a per-GB bill. Here is how to keep it free.
Azure VM right-sizing guide: cutting compute waste by family
Most Azure VM bills carry oversized instances that never touch their allocated CPU or memory. Right-sizing to the correct family and size, then layering reservations, is the highest-return Azure cost move. Here is how to do it.
Azure SQL serverless cost: when auto-pause beats provisioned
Azure SQL Database serverless bills compute per second and pauses when idle, which can slash the bill for intermittent workloads but cost more for steady ones. Here is where serverless wins and where provisioned vCore is cheaper.
Azure SQL elastic pools cost: sharing capacity across databases
Azure SQL elastic pools let many databases share a single pool of DTUs or vCores, which is far cheaper than provisioning each database on its own when their peaks do not coincide. Here is how the math works.
Azure Cosmos DB autoscale cost: when the 50% premium pays off
Cosmos DB autoscale raises the per-RU/s rate by 50 percent but scales throughput automatically between 10 percent and 100 percent of a maximum. For variable traffic it can be cheaper than standard provisioned; for flat traffic it is a needless premium. Here is the math.
Azure storage redundancy cost: LRS vs ZRS vs GRS explained
The redundancy option you pick for an Azure storage account changes the price of every gigabyte. LRS is the baseline, ZRS adds zone resilience, and GRS roughly doubles cost for cross-region durability. Here is what each buys and costs.
Azure Blob transaction cost: the per-operation charge people miss
Azure Blob Storage charges not just for gigabytes stored but for every read, write, and list operation, and on cool and archive tiers those transaction fees can dwarf the storage itself. Here is how transaction pricing works and how to control it.
Azure Monitor cost: taming metrics, alerts, and ingestion
Azure Monitor spans metrics, alerts, and Log Analytics ingestion, and the ingestion charge at roughly $2.30 per gigabyte is what usually runs the bill up. Here is how each part is priced and how to keep observability affordable.
Azure Application Gateway v2 cost: fixed fees plus capacity units
Application Gateway v2 bills a fixed hourly fee plus capacity units that scale with traffic, and the WAF-enabled SKU costs noticeably more. Here is how the pricing works and when a simpler load balancer is cheaper.
Azure AKS control plane cost: Free vs Standard tier explained
AKS offers a Free control plane with no uptime SLA and a Standard tier that charges about $0.10 per cluster per hour for a financially backed SLA. Here is when the paid tier is worth it and where the real AKS cost actually lives.
Azure VMSS Flexible vs Uniform cost: orchestration and spot mixing
Virtual Machine Scale Sets come in Flexible and Uniform orchestration modes. Neither mode has an orchestration fee, but Flexible's ability to mix spot and on-demand and different VM sizes changes what you can save. Here is the cost angle.