FinOps overhaul

expert

Scenario & brief

You've been handed a ~$6,000/mo architecture where nothing is right: a web tier and an API tier both on prev-gen on-demand instances in a single AZ, an oversized Multi-AZ database, and terabytes of cold data in S3 Standard — and there's no CDN or cache at all.

Targets: 8,000 rps, p99 ≤ 130 ms, 99.95% availability, critical durability, under $1,600/mo. Add the edge/cache components the design needs, right-size both compute tiers, fix the storage class, and don't add anything that doesn't earn its cost.

8,000 rps peakp99 ≤ 130ms99.95% availdurability: criticalbudget $1,600/mo

Add components

Decide what this architecture actually needs — not every option belongs here.

Web Tier

Compute

Instance class

Scaling

Instances (static)

4instances

Availability Zones

Purchasing

System health

Erupting · SLA breach

/ 100

Score

SLA not met yet

Monthly cost

$5,668

Budget $1,600/mo · $4,068 over

Metrics

Capacity43

Availability50

Durability25

Cost efficiency0

Requirements

Peak capacity — 52000 rps compute · 3400 rps db (need ≥ 8000 rps)
p99 latency — ~134 ms (need ≤ 130 ms)
Availability — 99.50% (need ≥ 99.95%)
Durability — at risk (need redundancy + backups)
Budget — $5668/mo (need ≤ $1600/mo)

Advisor

The database is saturated at peak — add a cache to shed read load, or scale it up.
Compute runs in a single AZ — spread across ≥2 AZs (with ≥2 instances) to meet the availability target.
Enable automated backups to satisfy the durability requirement.

Discussion

No comments yet. Be the first to start the discussion.

For learning purposes only. Costs and capacities are illustrative, not live AWS prices. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services.