Automating the estimation, tracking and projection of cloud infrastructure's run cost is necessary for today's organizations. The cloud providers' savvy pricing models, combined with the proliferation of pricing parameters and the dynamic nature of today's architecture, can lead to surprisingly expensive run costs. For example, the price of serverless based on API calls, event streaming solutions based on traffic or data processing clusters based on running jobs, all have a dynamic nature that changes over time as the architecture evolves. When our teams manage infrastructure on the cloud, implementing run cost as architecture fitness function is one of their early activities. This means that our teams can observe the cost of running services against the value delivered; when they see deviations from what was expected or acceptable, they'll discuss whether it's time to evolve the architecture. The observation and calculation of the run cost is implemented as an automated function.
Automating the estimation, tracking and projection of cloud infrastructure's run cost is necessary for today's organizations. The cloud providers' savvy pricing models, combined with proliferation of pricing parameters and the dynamic nature of today's architecture, can lead to surprisingly expensive run cost. For example, the price of serverless based on API calls, event streaming solutions based on traffic or data processing clusters based on running jobs, all have a dynamic nature that changes over time as the architecture evolves. When our teams manage infrastructure on the cloud, implementing run cost as architecture fitness function is one of their early activities. This means that our teams can observe the cost of running services against the value delivered; when they see deviations from what was expected or acceptable, they'll discuss whether it's time to evolve the architecture. The observation and calculation of the run cost is implemented as an automated function.
We still see teams who aren't tracking the cost of running their applications as closely as they should as their software architecture or usage evolves. This is particularly true when they're using serverless, which developers assume will provide lower costs since you're not paying for unused server cycles. However, the major cloud providers are pretty savvy at setting their pricing models, and heavily used serverless functions, although very useful for rapid iteration, can get expensive quickly when compared with dedicated cloud (or on-premise) servers. We advise teams to frame a system's run cost as architecture fitness function , which means: track the cost of running your services against the value delivered; when you see deviations from what was expected or acceptable, have a discussion about whether it's time to evolve your architecture.
