Cost
The money and resources a system consumes, including compute, storage, network, and operational time.
Definition
Cost is what the system consumes to run.
It includes money, but also time spent operating it.
Why it matters
Cost is a constraint, even when nobody says it out loud.
If you do not manage cost, it will manage you.
What usually drives cost
- Peak load capacity.
- Storage growth and retention.
- Network egress.
- Operational load, like on-call and incident response.