Checklist · Cloud

Cloud Workload Placement & Cost Checklist

Decide per workload rather than by blanket policy, the profile test for cloud versus owned, what to keep portable, and the cost mechanics that surprise every organisation.

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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#

	Name	Date
Completed by
Cost owner

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