2 - Cost Control
Moving to the cloud shifts infrastructure spend from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx)—but realising those savings requires deliberate, cost-aware design from the start.
What You’ll Learn
- The CapEx → OpEx mindset shift and why cloud infrastructure should be treated as a commodity
- Why requirements drive cost decisions—over-engineering for undefined SLAs leads to unnecessary spend and complexity
- Right-sizing: identifying and correcting over-provisioned VMs and PaaS tiers migrated from on-premises
- Auto-scaling: scaling out (more instances) vs. scaling up (larger SKUs), and why ephemeral scale-out is typically more cost-efficient for spiky or seasonal workloads
- Compute Resource Consolidation: reducing 10 service instances to 2 via colocation or containerisation on Kubernetes
- Governance and tagging: associating resources with metadata (environment, team, service) to enable cost reporting and chargeback
- Using cloud pricing calculators for bronze/silver/gold architecture cost modelling with stakeholders
- Reserved instances and licensing benefit portability (e.g., Azure Hybrid Benefit) for predictable, steady-state workloads
- DDoS cost risk: why auto-scale maximum instance limits and DDoS protection services are also financial safeguards
Key Mindset Shift
Treat cloud resources as cattle, not pets. Right-size, auto-scale, and regularly review spend against your workload’s actual usage patterns—turning the monthly bill into a continuous optimisation feedback loop rather than a fixed infrastructure investment.
Related Content
1 - Requirements in Context
Every cloud project starts with requirements. In this episode, Chris explores the critical pillars of cloud architecture: resilience (SLA, RTO, RPO, MTTR, MTBF), scalability, performance, and cost. Learn why defining requirements upfront—before drawing architecture diagrams—is essential, and how the same on-premises thinking about availability translates directly into the cloud.
Azure Myth 4: Azure is Magical! Management in the cloud compared with on-premises - Azure MythBuster
Moving workloads to Azure does not eliminate management decisions — scalability, resilience, and high availability all require deliberate configuration. This Azure Mythbusters episode contrasts scale-out via VM Scale Sets and auto-scale rules with scale-up by increasing VM SKU size, explains availability sets and availability zones, and shows how PaaS services like Azure Functions still require you to choose the right plan and design cross-region resilience with Traffic Manager.
Azure Myth 3: You don’t need requirements in the Cloud… Or do you? - Azure MythBusters
Requirements remain essential when migrating to or building on Azure — from availability SLAs and RPO/RTO targets to compliance, data sovereignty, and cost. This Azure Mythbusters episode uses composite SLA calculations and Azure Architecture Center reference architectures to show how under- or over-specifying requirements directly shapes your design, region strategy, and overall cost.