Cloud Workloads
FinOps Workload PlacementPick an architecture below to see its total cost across different providers, scaled to your requirements. Want to verify their certifications? Visit Compliance. Curious where they run? Explore Datacenters, or track the newest regions and features on the Announcements page. Want to check data freshness? See the platform Status. Last updated: Oct 4, 2026.
What is a Workload?
In the FinOps Framework, the Architecting & Workload Placement capability focuses on evaluating the total business value and cost efficiency of technology choices before provisioning. A workload models complete end-to-end architectures—like a customer-facing web app, a streaming telemetry pipeline, or an AI inference API—rather than isolated VMs. This reveals the true total cost of ownership (TCO) across providers by factoring in all connective tissue: load balancers, NAT gateways, multi-AZ clustering, storage IOPS, and data egress fees.
Middleware & Inter-App
4 workloadsResilient connective tissue, fallback buffers, API proxies, and event routers operating between systems.
Serverless Fallback & Resiliency Buffer
A resilient middleware buffer placed in front of serverless functions. Catches traffic spikes or cold-start timeouts by queuing requests into a persistent queue, caching session state, and dispatching to a failover VM worker pool.
AI Gateway, Guardrails & Caching Proxy
An enterprise middleware proxy positioned between internal applications and external LLM vendors. Enforces prompt security guardrails (WAF), performs semantic prompt caching, rate-limits tenant requests, and manages API keys securely.
Enterprise API Gateway & Auth Middleware
A standalone security & integration middleware layer placed in front of legacy or internal microservices to handle OAuth token validation, IP rate-limiting, TLS termination, and traffic shaping.
Cross-Cloud Event Router & Message Broker
A cross-cloud middleware layer connecting disparate applications across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments, converting event schemas and guaranteeing asynchronous delivery.
AI & Machine Learning
6 workloadsRetrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, LLMs, and multimodal vision/speech pipelines.
RAG AI Application
A generative AI application using a Foundational Model connected to a Vector Database to search proprietary documents and return grounded answers.
ML Training & Hosting
A pipeline for training machine-learning models on GPU clusters and serving them through a managed inference endpoint.
RAG AI Knowledge Base
A retrieval-augmented generation pipeline for AI chat and search — document storage, a metadata store, an API layer, embeddings, orchestration, and a managed inference endpoint.
Event-Driven Image Processing
An event-driven architecture that processes uploaded images (e.g., ID verification, insurance claims) by triggering serverless functions to run AI vision models and store the extracted metadata.
Voice AI Assistant
A speech-to-speech AI pipeline — incoming audio is transcribed, interpreted by a conversational LLM, and answered with a synthesized voice reply. Showcases how AI modality (Audio vs. Chat) and capability tier (Frontier vs. Standard) drive different AI product rows within one architecture.
Autonomous Agent Swarm
A distributed multi-agent system where specialized AI agents autonomously collaborate, route tasks via message queues, and share transient state in memory.
Web & Microservices
6 workloadsScalable web applications, container fleets, serverless backends, and multi-tenant platforms.
Serverless Web Application
A scalable, low-maintenance backend without provisioning servers. Perfect for event-driven web and mobile backends.
Classic 3-Tier Web Architecture
The foundational blueprint for monolithic or traditionally scaled web applications using VMs and relational databases. The deliberate minimal baseline.
E-Commerce Microservices Stack
A resilient, decoupled architecture designed for high availability, fast product lookups, and fault tolerance.
Kubernetes App Platform
A general-purpose container platform for running microservices and stateful applications on managed Kubernetes.
SaaS on Managed Platform
A multi-tenant SaaS product running on a managed application platform (PaaS) with a relational backend.
Event-Driven API Backend
An agile, fully serverless microservices backend combining managed API gateways, message queues, and rapid cache lookups.
Data Analytics & HPC
5 workloadsReal-time telemetry streaming, columnar data warehouses, and high-performance compute clusters.
Real-time Streaming Analytics
A highly demanded architecture for processing IoT telemetry, clickstreams, or financial data in real time.
HPC / Scientific Computing
A high-performance computing cluster for simulations, modeling, and batch scientific workloads.
Data Warehouse & BI
A cloud data warehouse feeding business-intelligence dashboards, fed by an ETL pipeline.
Content & Media Platform
A video/media platform that transcodes uploads and delivers content globally through a CDN.
Smart Manufacturing (IIoT)
An Industrial IoT (IIoT) platform for real-time sensor analytics — edge collection, stream ingestion, live metrics storage, historical analytics, and predictive maintenance.
Networking & Security
4 workloadsZero-trust edge gateways, hybrid cloud backbones, warm-standby disaster recovery, and compliance.
Disaster Recovery (Warm Standby)
A cross-region warm-standby environment that can take over if the primary region fails.
Compliance-Ready Web Application
A 3-tier web app hardened with managed security services for teams in regulated industries handling sensitive data. Security add-ons scale with the Security slider.
Hybrid Cloud Network Backbone
A robust networking architecture connecting on-premises data centers to cloud resources via dedicated connections and secure gateways.
Zero-Trust Enterprise Edge
A secure, global entry point that strictly authenticates all users and devices, mitigating bots and edge threats before traffic hits the application.