Project Every Record Counts: Data Engineering for Backend Engineers
Part 24: "The Bill Always Comes" — Cost and Performance Engineering
Finance asks what the platform will cost per month and per report, and Rohan reaches for a cluster size. Ingrid meters the platform instead: bytes stored, bytes scanned, CPU and requests, priced with list prices as inputs. The biggest lines turn out to be one dashboard tile, a nightly run rereading history, and storage no table owns. Three fixes, each measured before and after, plus FinOps unit economics and the FOCUS billing schema.