TCO Modeling

Concepts: paCostOptimization

What They Want to Hear 'TCO includes more than compute and storage. I model five cost categories: infrastructure (compute, storage, network), operational (on-call hours, incident response, monitoring tools), development (engineering hours to build and maintain), opportunity (what the team cannot build while maintaining this system), and risk (cost of data quality incidents, SLA violations). Most architecture decisions look different when you include operational and opportunity costs. A $50K/year streaming platform that saves 100 engineering hours/year in manual data corrections is a net positive even before you count the business value of fresher data.' This is the answer that shows you justify architecture decisions as business investments, not technical preferences.