Chapter 16: Cloud Costs and Budgeting
In this chapter, you'll learn how cloud billing works across IaaS, PaaS, and FaaS, how to use reserved and spot instances, and how to set budgets and avoid cost overruns in production.
In Chapter 15 of the LFCA Certification Course, you learned how FaaS and BaaS work in serverless computing, how the pay-per-use billing model helps reduce costs for workloads that run occasionally, and the common limitations such as cold starts, vendor lock-in, and execution time limits.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how cloud billing works in real environments. We’ll cover the different pricing models used for compute, storage, and data transfer, along with the tools cloud providers offer to monitor and control spending.
You’ll also learn how reserved instances and spot instances help reduce costs for predictable or fault-tolerant workloads, and the common mistakes that often lead to unexpected cloud bills in production.
The Cloud Computing Fundamentals domain (18%) in the LFCA exam tests cloud cost concepts at a beginner level. Questions usually focus on choosing the right pricing model, understanding basic cost optimization techniques, and knowing the purpose of cloud cost management tools.
Once you understand how cloud usage translates into billing, these topics become much easier to understand and remember.
The concepts covered in this chapter apply across all major cloud providers and Linux distributions.