Cloud costs are a top SRE concern. Interviewers test your cost awareness.
Cost optimization:
- Right-sizing: Match instance size to workload
- Reserved/Savings Plans: Commit for -% discounts
- Spot Instances: Fault-tolerant workloads, -% off
- Auto-scaling: Scale down during low traffic
- Storage tiering: S3 Intelligent-Tiering, lifecycle policies
Interview question: "How would you reduce cloud costs by %?"
Audit unused resources. Right-size based on utilization. Use reserved capacity for baseline, spot for burst. Implement auto-scaling.