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

33 practiced

You are building a migration business case and asked to perform sensitivity analysis where migration costs can vary +/- 20% and cloud usage growth could be between 5% and 20% annually. Which variables do you vary, what output metrics (NPV, payback, IRR, annual run rate) do you use to show sensitivity, and how would you visually present the results to decision-makers?

EasyTechnical

28 practiced

Explain what 'rightsizing' means in cloud cost planning. As a BI Analyst with access to CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network metrics across VMs and containers, outline a step-by-step process to identify candidates for rightsizing and produce recommendations that balance cost savings and performance reliability.

EasyTechnical

25 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

24 practiced

You need to allocate shared network and NAT gateway costs across projects proportionally to each project's egress volume. Sketch the SQL or LookML approach to compute allocated cost per project given two tables:

1) shared_costs(product STRING, date DATE, cost FLOAT)2) egress_usage(project_id STRING, date DATE, bytes_egress FLOAT)

Explain how you handle projects with zero recorded egress and historical changes in egress patterns.

MediumTechnical

31 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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