A cloud administrator for a retail business identified a significant month-to-month increase in the cost...

The most likely cause of the increasing storage cost is suboptimal storage tier configuration for archival data (Option C). Cloud providers offer different storage tiers, such as:

Hot Storage: Expensive but optimized for frequent access.

Cool Storage (Warm Storage): More affordable for infrequently accessed data.

Cold Storage (Archival Storage): The cheapest option, designed for long-term storage with occasional access.

If archival data is stored in a more expensive hot storage tier instead of a cost-effective archival storage tier, the monthly costs can increase significantly without any real benefit.

A. The database (DB) data drive size is set to 512GB, and the DB size is 384GB.

This does not directly impact cost because cloud storage costs are typically based on actual usage, not allocated capacity (except in pre-provisioned volumes).

A 512GB allocated drive does not necessarily mean all space is being used.

B. The virtual memory in IaaS instances is utilizing space from the OS drive.

While virtual memory (swap space) can impact performance, it does not significantly contribute to increasing storage costs unless there is excessive swapping to premium storage.

However, swap usage is a compute-related issue, not a storage-tier pricing issue.

D. The DB backup drive is reaching 80% utilization and needs to be cleaned up.

While excessive backups can increase storage costs, cloud storage providers typically offer lifecycle management policies to automatically archive or delete old backups.

80% utilization does not necessarily correlate with a rapid increase in storage costs, and backup data should be managed separately.

The most likely reason for month-over-month increases in storage costs is that archival data is stored in an expensive storage tier rather than a cost-effective archival tier. Implementing proper storage lifecycle policies and moving data to cheaper cold storage can optimize costs.