# Design principles
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+  **Monitor usage patterns:** Life sciences workloads often have unpredictable usage spikes during research phases or clinical trials. Continuously monitor usage and costs at the application and workload level to scale resources efficiently. 
+  **Align costs to business value:** Prioritize cost optimization for workloads directly driving research breakthroughs or enabling mission-critical applications. Optimize lower-value workloads over time. 
+  **Implement flexible capacity:** Use a mix of On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances to balance performance, availability, and cost for compute-intensive research and development workloads. 
+  **Centralize cost visibility:** Implement Cloud Financial Management to provide organization-wide cost transparency and accountability, aligning IT spend to business priorities. 

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