FinOps

Cut Idle VM Cost Without Risky Shutdowns | GCP PCA

14 December 2025·704 words·4 mins

Architecture Drills Google Cloud Platform GCP PCA GCP FinOps SRE Compute Engine

A global fintech startup needs to reduce costs by managing non-production Compute Engine workloads that have different availability requirements from production.

Pricing Calculator Cost Trade-offs | GCP ACE

14 December 2025·1112 words·6 mins

Architecture Drills Google Cloud Platform GCP ACE GCP FinOps Cloud Pricing Calculator Cloud SQL Compute Engine Cost Optimization

Learn why the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is the foundational tool for accurate cost estimation when migrating three-tier applications to GCP, and how to avoid common pitfalls like manual spreadsheets or premature production testing.

Migration Trade-offs for Stateful Apps | SAP-C02

14 December 2025·1492 words·8 mins

Architecture Drills AWS SAP-C02 FinOps Decision Matrix Aurora PostgreSQL Application Load Balancer Auto Scaling Stateful Applications Session Affinity

This SAP-C02 drill examines how to architect for both database read scalability (Aurora Replicas) and application session consistency (ALB sticky sessions) when migrating stateful workloads—a common pitfall that distinguishes professional-level thinking from associate-level shortcuts.

Private S3 via VPC Endpoint Trade-offs | SAA-C03

14 December 2025·542 words·3 mins

Architecture Drills Cloud Provider AWS SAA-C03 FinOps VPC Endpoint Amazon S3 Security

A cloud application running on EC2 instances inside a VPC needs to privately access logs stored in Amazon S3 without internet connectivity. This drill explores how to securely enable S3 access by evaluating different AWS solution options.

Bigtable Audit Logging Decision Trade-offs | GCP ACE

12 December 2025·607 words·3 mins

Architecture Drills Google Cloud Platform GCP ACE GCP FinOps SRE Bigtable Audit Logs

This drill explores how to enable comprehensive read/write logging of sensitive Bigtable data for integration with a SIEM system, detailing the trade-offs and best practices in audit log management.

SCPs for M&A Onboarding Trade-offs | SAP-C02

12 December 2025·1099 words·6 mins

Architecture Drills AWS SAP-C02 FinOps Decision Matrix AWS Organizations SCP Governance M&A Integration

A professional-level analysis of AWS Organizations SCP architecture during M&A integration - balancing temporary flexibility with long-term governance stability.

Cost Trade-offs for Low-Traffic Apps | GCP ACE

11 December 2025·502 words·3 mins

Architecture Drills Google Cloud Platform GCP ACE GCP FinOps SRE Cloud Run

A low-traffic containerized application deployment scenario emphasizing cost efficiency and service selection.

Multi-Region API Failover Trade-offs | SAP-C02

11 December 2025·1423 words·7 mins

Architecture Drills AWS SAP-C02 FinOps Decision Matrix API Gateway Lambda DynamoDB Global Tables Route 53 Disaster Recovery

Designing multi-region API resilience requires balancing DNS routing strategies, regional Lambda deployments, and DynamoDB replication. This drill exposes the critical difference between edge-optimized endpoints and regional API Gateway deployments for disaster recovery.

Cross-Account S3 Access Trade-offs | SAA-C03

11 December 2025·636 words·3 mins

Architecture Drills Cloud Provider (AWS) AWS SAA-C03 FinOps Decision Matrix Amazon S3

A company wants to restrict an S3 bucket’s access only to users within its AWS Organization accounts with minimal operational overhead. We analyze four approaches to meet this requirement.

GKE vs VMs for Low-Ops Staged Releases | GCP PCA

10 December 2025·625 words·3 mins

Architecture Drills Google Cloud Platform GCP PCA GCP FinOps SRE Google Kubernetes Engine

This drill explores selecting a cloud environment that balances developer agility and outsourced operations autonomy with minimal operational overhead.