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Cloud Cost Modeling and Planning Questions

Building and evaluating cost models for cloud adoption and migration, including estimating total cost of ownership, comparing on premise and cloud deployment costs, and developing business cases for cloud investments. Skills include mapping workload characteristics to cloud pricing models, forecasting usage and growth, accounting for licensing and migration one time costs, modeling ongoing operational costs, and incorporating discounts such as reserved capacity and spot pricing. Also covers scenario and sensitivity analysis, capacity planning and rightsizing, cost governance practices such as tagging and showback or chargeback, measuring financial outcomes and return on investment, and strategies for post migration cost optimization and financial monitoring.

MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You are tasked with building monthly chargeback reports per business unit. Describe how you would define allocation rules for shared resources (e.g., load balancers, NAT gateways, shared storage), how to codify those rules in the ETL layer, and your process for handling disputes from teams claiming incorrect allocations.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Design a Power BI data model and incremental refresh strategy to handle daily cloud billing CSVs for two years of data, ensuring responsive dashboards and correct cumulative calculations. Describe table structure (raw, staging, fact), partitioning approach, composite models or aggregated tables, and DAX patterns to calculate YTD and rolling sums efficiently.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
As a Business Intelligence Analyst responsible for cloud cost reporting, explain the main components of a cloud cost model you would include in a TCO (compute, storage, network, licensing, data transfer, operational support, monitoring, and migration one-time costs). Describe the differences between on‑demand, reserved/committed, and spot/preemptible pricing, give one concrete example of when each pricing type is appropriate, and mention one risk or drawback for each.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Write a DAX measure (pseudo-code is acceptable) for Power BI that computes month-to-date (MTD) cloud spend, taking into account that billing lines may be posted after the usage date (late credits). The measure should use usage_date for MTD but allow toggling to invoice_date for cash flow views.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
A legacy on-premise application is licensed per CPU core. When modeling migration to cloud VMs or containers, explain 3 approaches to incorporate licensing costs into the cloud cost model (e.g., keep licenses on-prem, BYOL with cloud VMs, move to license-included managed services). Describe trade-offs, how you would estimate core counts for containers, and one reporting approach to communicate licensing impact.

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