Sustain: Capacity, Cost, Energy and Lifecycle

All courses / AI Operations / Module 2 / Chapter 11

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Explain why a capacity forecast is stated as an interval with a back-test and an uplift
• Distinguish usage decisions from rate decisions and say which belong in an agent's mandate
• Design floors, windows and a veto that keep an optimising agent from removing recovery margin
• Set remediation windows for vulnerabilities by maintenance group, with a ceiling for the agent's deploy action

Key concepts

Forecast as a distribution

A single value cannot decide how much margin to buy. The forecast gives an interval, the interval is accepted on a back-test of its coverage, and an uplift is applied where measured coverage falls below the nominal, as in CAP-HM-2028-014 where 80 per cent was measured against a nominal 95.

Usage and rate decisions

A usage decision, such as switching a resource off, can usually be undone and the cost of error is an interval in which the service was too small. A rate decision, such as a commitment to a term or purchase, cannot, and is a finance decision that is not delegated to an agent.

Floor

A lower bound the agent cannot cross, expressed in the unit of the claim it protects: a redundancy floor, a standby floor that allows reduction only after a dated failover test at the reduced size has passed, a retention floor and protected labels.

Veto

The right of the service owner, and of the incident commander during an incident, to block, reverse or suspend a proposal of the optimising agent without giving a reason to the agent.

Maintenance group

A set of assets of similar characteristics with a routine patch window and an emergency trigger set in advance. In the chapter's illustrative defaults, exposed Tier 1 assets have 14 days routinely, and on reported exploitation mitigation within 24 hours and patching within 72 hours.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. A target such as reducing the cloud bill by ten per cent will be met by the cheapest route available. What would you add to the target so that the route does not pass through the recovery margin?
2. With public certificate validity scheduled to fall to 47 days by March 2029, what in your renewal process still depends on a person remembering?
3. The chapter reports patch velocity as a distribution by maintenance group and never by person. What would be lost, and what protected, by that choice in your organisation?

Written exercise

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

1. On whom does the annual data centre reporting duty of Article 12 of the Energy Efficiency Directive fall, according to the chapter?

   1. The owner or operator of a data centre with installed IT power demand of at least 500 kW
   2. Every organisation that rents capacity in a colocation or cloud facility, whatever its size
   3. The provider of any general-purpose AI model served from a European data centre
   4. The management body of a financial entity, as part of its DORA Article 5 duties
   Show the answer

   A. The owner or operator of a data centre with installed IT power demand of at least 500 kW
   The duty falls on the owner or operator of the data centre at or above 500 kW. An organisation that rents capacity obtains the figures from its provider; attributing energy to services is its own work.

2. What is the book's starting ceiling for an agent's action of deleting an unused resource?

   1. Level 3 Bounded, since unused resources are waste by definition
   2. Level 2 Supervised, with approval by the FinOps lead
   3. Level 0 Advisory for the agent; a person deletes after quarantine
   4. Level 4 Autonomous, but only for resources in non-production accounts
   Show the answer

   C. Level 0 Advisory for the agent; a person deletes after quarantine
   Delete is irreversible except from backup, so the agent only advises and a person deletes after a quarantine period. Level 4 is never used for data that cannot be restored.

3. Under the standby floor, when may an optimising agent's proposal to reduce a recovery site be accepted?

   1. When the standby has been idle for a full quarter and availability stayed green
   2. When a failover test at the reduced size has passed within the recovery time objective, with dated evidence
   3. When the forecast interval for demand at the primary site has narrowed
   4. When the agent's own report shows that no harm followed earlier reductions
   Show the answer

   B. When a failover test at the reduced size has passed within the recovery time objective, with dated evidence
   The standby floor ties the size of the recovery site to a restore test. Availability measures stay green while no failover is happening, so only a dated passing test at the reduced size supports the reduction.