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The Cost Constraint

Designing Cloud Systems With the Bill in Mind

By Aaron Whitfield

Multi-cloudPractitionerCostArchitecture

Most cost work happens too late, in a spreadsheet, after the architecture is fixed. By then the available savings are rounding errors — reserved instances and a few idle volumes.

Aaron Whitfield argues for treating cost like latency: a property you design for. He covers the handful of architectural decisions that dominate a cloud bill (egress topology, storage class transitions, compute commitment shape, and data gravity), and how to attribute spend accurately enough that teams can act on it.

Includes the unit-economics model that turns a monthly invoice into a per-request number engineers can optimize.

What you'll learn

  • Identify the four decisions that dominate most cloud bills
  • Build a unit-economics model down to cost per request
  • Attribute spend to teams accurately enough to drive change
  • Design egress and storage topology before it becomes expensive

Table of contents

  1. 01Cost Is a Design Constraint24 pp
  2. 02Egress Topology36 pp
  3. 03Storage Classes and Lifecycle32 pp
  4. 04Commitment Shape34 pp
  5. 05Data Gravity30 pp
  6. 06Attribution That Drives Action38 pp
  7. 07Unit Economics34 pp

7 chapters · 306 pages total

Details

ISBN
978-1-959321-08-3
Edition
1st
Pages
306
Published
Formats
PDF, EPUB
Platform
Multi-cloud

About the author

Aaron Whitfield

FinOps Practitioner

Aaron has cut eight-figure cloud bills without cutting a single feature. He argues that cost is a design constraint, not an accounting problem.

Also available in The AWS Mastery Track — save $31Five titles that take you from the resource model through event-driven design, architecture review, and the certification that proves it.View bundle →Also available in The GCP Mastery Track — save $27Four titles built around Google Cloud's actual model, from the resource hierarchy to correct streaming pipelines.View bundle →

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