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.
On-demand bills per request, provisioned bills per capacity-hour. The break-even is around 25% utilization. Here's the actual math, the decision framework, and how to set up auto-scaling and Reserved Capacity for the lowest steady-state cost.
RDS is cheaper per instance hour; Aurora has more efficient storage and built-in replicas. Here's when each one wins, including Aurora I/O Optimized, Aurora Serverless v2, and Reserved Capacity options.
Cold starts are mostly a latency problem, not a cost problem (except for Java). Here's when they matter, what each runtime's typical cold start looks like, and when Provisioned Concurrency or SnapStart pay for themselves.
Estimate Google Cloud costs from Terraform configurations with sustained-use discounts applied automatically, Committed Use Discounts via usage file, and Spot VMs detected from the resource. No GCP credentials required.
Six S3 storage classes spanning 99x in per-GB price. Here's when Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive each make sense, with lifecycle policy patterns.
The most opaque part of the AWS bill, broken down. Internet egress, cross-region, cross-AZ, NAT processing, CloudFront, VPC endpoints. The five biggest cost surprises and how to fix them.
The honest cost comparison between EKS and ECS, including control plane fees, Fargate vs EC2 trade-offs, and when each platform makes financial sense. With concrete numbers from a 10-service production fleet.
Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Standard and Convertible Reserved Instances. The actual discount math, what each one covers, and a decision framework for which commitment to buy.
Spot instances offer 50-90% discounts but can be reclaimed with 2 minutes notice. Here's when they're worth it, how to handle interruptions gracefully, and how to combine Spot with Savings Plans for the lowest total cost.
Cost regressions are a category of bug that production-quality teams catch automatically. Here's how to add a budget gate to GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket, Atlantis, and Spacelift in five minutes.
How to estimate the monthly cost of a CloudFormation template before deploying. SAM templates, CDK output, nested stacks, and the patterns that work for migrating an existing CloudFormation workflow.
Federal, defense, and regulated industries can't use SaaS-based cost tools. Here's how to set up fully offline Terraform cost estimation for IL5/IL6, GovCloud, and classified environments.
NAT Gateway is the second-most-expensive AWS resource for many production workloads. Here's how to cut its cost by 60-90% using free VPC Gateway Endpoints, paid Interface Endpoints, and NAT instances.
From a single CLI command to PR comments in CI that block over-budget merges, this is the practical guide to Terraform cost estimation. No AWS credentials, no terraform plan, no SaaS account.
gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 with better baseline performance. The migration is in-place with no downtime. Here's exactly when it saves money, when it doesn't, and how to migrate safely at scale.
Honest comparison of C3X vs Infracost for Terraform cost estimation. Where each tool wins, full feature matrix, and a migration guide for teams switching off Infracost.