Costs and FinOps

The use of cloud computing services are charged based on a variety of factors. In general, the hardware type and usage, storage type and usage, and network usage all contribute to the overall costs when using infrastructure as a service, while when using platforms and software as a service, the costs are based on e.g. the specific services, the number of users, the use, and so on.

To understand the pricing associated with cloud computing resources, it's meaningful to take a look at the offerings of a concrete cloud computing vendor. Here, your tasks is to visit the Amazon Web Services pricing site, and create a question that asks about the price of a specific service or a service combination.

For writing the question, refer also to the notes on good questions.

Write the question using the widget shown below.

Once you have created the question, answer three or more peer-authored questions below. After each question, you are given a possibility to rate the question -- please, rate each question that you answer.

As you might have observed when creating the question above and answering the questions from others, the costs of cloud computing services can stem from a wide variety of factors, some of which may be also surprising. As an example, the network traffic between the cloud computing resources and the outside world can be quite expensive, especially when not considered beforehand. When deploying software on the cloud, using a content-delivery network, serving a production build, and compressing the served content receive an additional meaning through the possibility to save money.

The need to maintain and control cloud computing costs has led to a cultural practice of FinOps -- a mix of "Finance" and "DevOps", emphasizing the need for communication and collaboration between engineering teams and finance teams. The goal of FinOps is to ensure that the cloud computing costs are kept under control, and that the cloud computing resources are used in an efficient manner.

For additional information, see FinOps.org.