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.

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

36 practiced

You receive a daily billing export table named billing_export with schema:

invoice_id STRING,
account_id STRING,
product STRING,
usage_start_date DATE,
usage_end_date DATE,
usage_quantity FLOAT,
cost DECIMAL(10,2),
currency STRING

Write an ANSI SQL query to compute total cost per account per calendar month in USD (assume costs are already in USD). The output should include account_id, month (format YYYY-MM), and total_cost ordered by account and month.

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.

MediumSystem Design

33 practiced

Design a cost dashboard for a Kubernetes environment that shows cost by namespace and by pod, highlights the top cost-driving deployments, and projects potential savings if pods migrated from on-demand to spot or right-sized. What telemetry (metrics and labels) do you need, how do you map node costs to pods, and how do you estimate projected savings conservatively?

EasyTechnical

35 practiced

Given the table monthly_costs(project_id STRING, month_start DATE, cost FLOAT), write an ANSI SQL query using window functions to compute a 3-month rolling average cost per project (including the current month and previous two months). Explain how you would handle months with missing rows for a project (gaps).

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