# Pipeline cost grows monotonically unless something pushes back Canonical URL: Domain: Pipeline Design ยท Difficulty: medium ## Problem Pipeline cost grows monotonically unless something pushes back. Reactive cost work, kicked off when the bill becomes alarming, costs more than proactive cost work. The section's five levers: storage tiering (cold partitions to cheaper classes), partition pruning audits (queries scanning more partitions than they need), materialized view ROI (drop views whose maintenance exceeds their query savings), warehouse right-sizing (downsize compute on workloads that no longer need it), and query rewriting (the heaviest queries by spend). Pick the next cost lever by adding a cost-rhythm transform whose name states the monthly cadence, the lever audit that runs each month, and the accountability artifact (a cost owner per pipeline tier). ## Related - [All practice problems](https://datadriven.io/problems) - [Mock interview mode](https://datadriven.io/interview/pipeline-cost-grows-monotonically-unless-something-pushes-ba-2eabc12d) - [System Design Interview Questions](https://datadriven.io/data-engineering-system-design) - [Data Engineering Interview Prep Guide](https://datadriven.io/data-engineer-interview-prep) - [Daily Challenge](https://datadriven.io/daily) --- Source: DataDriven (https://datadriven.io). 100% free data engineering interview prep. Live code execution against Postgres 16, Python 3.11, and Spark sandboxes. No paywall, no premium tier, no signup gate.