FinOps Strategy: Cognition-as-a-Service

Cost effectiveness is crucial. We utilize a Serverless Scale-to-Zero architecture on Azure.

Cost Architecture

• Compute: Azure Container Apps (ACA).
  • Scale to Zero: Services (Agent, ETL) scale down to 0 replicas when not in use. You pay $0.
  • Spot Instances: Use standard/spot profiles where applicable.
• Database: Azure Postgres Flexible Server.
  • Tier: Burstable B1ms (1 vCore, 2GB RAM).
  • Cost: ~$15/month (approx, depending on region/reserved).
• Orchestration: Self-hosted Temporal (Dev setup) on ACA, or Temporal Cloud (Free Tier if eligible).

Estimated Monthly Cost (PoC)

Component	Resource	Estimated Cost
Memory Database	Postgres B1ms	~$15.00
Compute (Agent/API)	ACA (Active 20h/mo)	~$2.00
Orchestration	Temporal (Self-hosted)	~$5.00 (Shared resources)
Storage	Blob Storage (LRS)	< $1.00
Total		~$23.00 / month

Note: Costs increase with load. The critical “Scale-to-Zero” feature keeps idle costs at the database baseline.

Tracking

• Tags: All resources tagged with Project=CognitionService.
• Alerts: Budget alert set at $50/month.