Cloud Workload Placement & Cost Checklist

Workload: _______________ Date: _______

Decide per workload. Blanket policies are expensive in either direction — roughly a fifth of everything moved to public cloud has since been pulled back.

1. Profile this workload#

• [ ] Load pattern recorded: steady / variable / spiky / seasonal
• [ ] Utilisation measured, not assumed
• [ ] Data egress volume estimated
• [ ] Availability requirement stated
• [ ] Data residency requirement stated
• [ ] Expected lifetime stated

2. Cloud is likely right if#

• [ ] Load is variable or unpredictable
• [ ] It needs services you would not build yourself
• [ ] It is new and may not survive
• [ ] It needs global reach
• [ ] It is a disaster recovery standby

3. Owned is likely right if#

• [ ] Steady, predictable, always-on load
• [ ] High and constant data egress
• [ ] Storage- or compute-heavy with stable demand
• [ ] Production AI inference at volume — steady, high-volume, and where per-token pricing bites hardest

Decision: Cloud / Owned / Hybrid · By: _______ · Reviewed: _______

4. Portability — what makes a later change possible#

• [ ] Data is exportable, and the export has been tested
• [ ] Application containerised
• [ ] Infrastructure described in code
• [ ] Standard database engine where the difference from proprietary is small
• [ ] For each proprietary service: if this vanished, how long to replace it? ______

Weeks is an acceptable answer. If it is measured in quarters, that service is load-bearing — treat the dependency as a decision requiring sign-off, not a default.

5. Cost controls#

• [ ] Budget alerts set before the first workload
• [ ] Mandatory tags: owner, environment, cost centre — untagged resources are never deleted because nobody dares
• [ ] Non-production switched off outside working hours, automated
• [ ] Retention policies on logs, snapshots, backups
• [ ] Orphaned resources audited: unattached disks, IPs, idle load balancers
• [ ] Right-sized against measured usage, not the guessed specification
• [ ] Reserved capacity committed only to a provable baseline
• [ ] Top ten line items reviewed monthly with someone who can explain each
• [ ] A named person owns the bill

6. The costs that surprise people#

• [ ] Data transfer out — charged per GB by every provider
• [ ] Cross-availability-zone traffic
• [ ] Stopped instances still billing for storage
• [ ] Unattached IP addresses
• [ ] Load balancers with no traffic
• [ ] NAT gateway — hourly and per-GB
• [ ] Managed-service premiums on workloads that did not need managing

7. Security#

• [ ] Shared responsibility understood — they secure the platform, you secure the configuration
• [ ] Public storage access blocked by default
• [ ] MFA on privileged accounts
• [ ] Encryption at rest enabled
• [ ] Audit logging on, ideally to a separate account

8. Avoid the two expensive mistakes#

• [ ] Not lift-and-shifting unchanged — captures almost none of the benefit and adds the rental margin
• [ ] Not running multi-cloud to avoid lock-in without a specific reason — the complexity of both, the discounts of neither

Sign-off#

Back to Cloud