Cost Estimation 💰️

An important good practice in software engineering is to consider total cost of ownership (TCO) throughout the development lifecycle. TCO looks beyond just the initial development costs to include long-running costs as infrastructure, maintenance and support.

To help minimize TCO, it is recommended to incorporate design reviews as a regular part of the development process. Design reviews bring together stakeholders and/or design advocates to validate the design, engineering standards are followed, documentation is available, and technical approaches before major development efforts commence. This provides an opportunity to identify potential risks, limitations, and areas of improvement early on that could incur significant costs down the road.

Tools

Infrastructure

• AWS Cost Explorer - with proper resource tagging, if AWS is your cloud provider
• Infracost - cloud cost estimations as part of your workflow along with your pull requests

Documentation

• MADR - bring context-awareness by documenting architecture/design decisions
• Service Management - more details on standards and documentation a company can setup