List every operating duty, its frequency, expected duration, skill level, backup owner, and evidence source. Separate planned maintenance from incident work, migration work, and product engineering that will be delayed by internal platform ownership.
Inventory duties from the responsibility boundary
For each scenario, assign provisioning, image maintenance, dependency upgrades, patching, capacity management, scaling, tenant isolation, access control, secrets, observability, backups, recovery tests, vendor management, user support, incident response, and decommissioning. Managed products may retain some duties while shifting others to the buyer, so use the provider's current responsibility and support documentation rather than the word managed alone.
Estimate recurring hours by week, month, quarter, and year. Add event-driven work using an observed incident history or an explicit range when history is absent. Identify the primary and backup skill required. One expert who can operate the stack during ordinary weeks does not establish coverage during leave, turnover, or a simultaneous product incident.
Price labor without erasing capacity and interruption
Apply buyer-approved loaded rates to hours, but preserve the hours and role names beside the dollar result. Add recruiting, onboarding, training, and knowledge-transfer work when a scenario requires skills the team does not currently hold. Record after-hours coverage and interruption separately because a small number of unpredictable hours can have a different operating effect from scheduled project work.
State what product or research work those hours displace. This is not a claim that every infrastructure hour produces equivalent lost revenue. It is a capacity record that lets the buyer decide whether internal ownership fits the team's priorities. Sensitivity ranges should show how the result changes if maintenance or incidents are half or twice the central estimate.
Where the service stops
Reality Contact, LLC prepares a technical cost and operating-burden model, but does not provide financial, tax, legal, procurement, security, or compliance advice, select a vendor, certify savings, or own the buyer's architecture decision. The buyer verifies internal rates and requirements, obtains current binding provider quotes, reviews security and compliance with qualified owners, and decides whether to renew, negotiate, pilot, migrate, or hold. This is technical cost modeling and document preparation; it does not replace financial, tax, legal, procurement, security, compliance, or professional advice. Public and supplied prices are dated inputs, not binding quotes, and the buyer must verify current terms and requirements before acting.
Sources: Kubernetes production environment guidance; FinOps Framework capabilities.