Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

5 Cloud Tagging Best Practices Every SaaS Company Should Use

Ask anyone who’s managing any cloud environment of any size, and they will undoubtedly bring up the stress they experience on a regular basis over tags. Since the dawn of cloud, every cloud user has struggled with the challenge of tagging — essentially the only mechanism that exists for you to apply metadata to your cloud environment. The fact that tags themselves are an imperfect tool — both inflexible and hard to manage — makes no difference.

How To Calculate TCO On AWS: A Step-By-Step Guide

Organizations often assume that switching to Amazon Web Services (AWS) will automatically reduce their on-premises spending. Certainly, cloud-based services like AWS' Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can offer significant cost savings. Yet overspending on AWS is quite common. How can you tell if moving to AWS is the right decision? What figures would you use to quantify and justify that choice to decision-makers? Enter Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on AWS.

Amazon S3 Cost Optimization Best Practices

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an essential cornerstone of AWS and among its most popular service offerings. S3 allows tenants to store, secure, and retrieve data from S3 buckets on demand. It is widely used for its high availability, scalability, and performance. It supports six storage classes and several use cases, including website hosting, backups, application data storage, and data lake storage. There are two primary components of Amazon S3: Buckets and Objects.

Be in charge of your cloud costs with these 2021 releases: CloudSpend recap

The widespread adoption of digital transformation triggered by the global health crisis has created a boom. For some businesses, the transition was smooth, but for others, it was an aggressive shift. Out of all the challenges posed by the transition to digital environments, messy cloud cost management and rocketing cloud bills are the most taxing. According to Gartner, through 2024, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will bear cloud costs that hurt their on-premises budgets.

7 AWS Migration Strategies That Can Help Prevent Overspending

Many companies don’t know where to begin when migrating to AWS. Some worry their data will leak, while others don't know the most efficient migration strategy for AWS. Another group worries about overspending when moving to AWS. The migration strategy involved plays a crucial part in all of these concerns. This guide will discuss more than just AWS cloud migration strategies.

Introducing CloudZero Budgets: Improve Cost Predictability And Eliminate Surprises

The best budgets aren't roadblocks. They're guardrails: boundaries for quick, collaborative work. Historically, when finance and engineering teams have discussed cloud cost, they’ve run into an obstacle: They don’t speak the same language. At the end of each month, finance gets an ever-changing cloud bill, and engineering explains that, whatever the total, it represents what they need to do their work. Stalemate.

19 Questions To Ask Your Cloud Cost Management Vendor

Not all cloud cost management tools are equal. Whether you’re in the process of evaluating cloud cost management vendors or already have a tool in place, here are 19 questions you should ask to ensure you have all the capabilities needed to maximize performance and minimize cost of your hybrid cloud deployment across the following.

The 10 Best AWS Migration Tools (Updated 2022)

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud can be arduous and time-consuming. A cloud migration would take years if engineers manually moved data from assessment through mobilization and migration phases. An effective cloud migration also requires adequate data encryption, fast data transfer speeds, and constant monitoring. Migrating workloads to AWS requires you to monitor costs in real-time as well to avoid overspending.

Efficient Container Monitoring with Pepperdata

Container monitoring strategies and purpose-built container monitoring tools just may be the next hot topics swirling around the Kubernetes discussion forums this year. Over 77% of IT professionals expected to migrate 50% or more of their workloads to containers with Kubernetes by the end of last year. With the rise of container usage growing, having the ability to monitor the performance of your containerized workloads is critical.

Why COGS Isn't The Most Relevant Cost Metric For SaaS Companies

For most SaaS companies, COGS (which stands for cost of goods sold) is used to calculate gross margin and profit. COGS is an accepted term with a specific definition under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — and is widely used as part of calculations to gauge the health and valuation of a company. Like many accounting practices, COGS stems from the industrial era, when most businesses were concerned with the creation of physical goods.

6 Actionable Ways To Improve Your Cloud Efficiency

With incredibly complex cloud architecture — that may even includes Kubernetes and multi-tenant infrastructure — organizations are finding it hard to measure and monitor the performance and cost of their cloud environments. To stay competitive, organizations should aim to be as efficient as possible — which can help companies to lower costs, increase margins, and improve cloud efficiency.

Big Data Cloud Performance Management: How to Do it Right

Big data cloud performance management is key to success in the cloud. Paired with cloud computing, big data can transform an enterprise—especially when managed correctly. It requires no CapEx, enables quicker data processing and analysis, and allows for rapid scalability. But not having a plan to properly manage your big data performance in the cloud can be the difference between realizing the ROI the cloud promises and having to move back to the data center in defeat.

9 Cloud FinOps Challenges - And The Solutions To Overcome Them

Companies migrate to the cloud to become more productive, respond to market changes, and be flexible — while spending less on cloud infrastructure. But there is one thing that many cloud-based organizations have learned: Cloud costs add up. Fast. As a result, 71% of cloud financial management teams doubt they will achieve expected results at the expected time or at all. Only 29% of cloud FinOps teams expect to achieve their cloud goals.

Control Plane Demo

Control Plane is a perfect substrate to run microservices. When you deploy on Control Plane, your containerized apps run concurrently on AWS, Azure and GCP. Customers experience ultra-low latency, 99.999% availability and you can mix-n-match ALL the services of AWS, Azure and GCP as if those clouds have virtually merged. All your "Ops" portion of "DevOps" has been codified so developers are freed to focus on the Dev part and leave the Ops part to the platform.

Why Serverless? The Next Wave Of Cloud Cost Optimization

Traditionally, applications are developed and deployed on local servers managed by developers. This keeps the whole process under the control of one development team that is responsible for keeping the system running smoothly. With serverless computing, however, the server management and code execution within applications takes place remotely, under the control of the cloud service provider rather than an in-house development team.

How To Calculate Customer Retention Cost: The Hidden SaaS Metric

You may have heard that keeping an existing customer is five times cheaper than acquiring a new one. But that isn't always true. “Hidden costs” often accompany customer retention, loyalty, and increasing "share of customer". Could you be spending more on retaining customers than on winning new ones? This quick guide will walk you through the meaning of Customer Retention Cost (CRC), why it's important to calculate, and how to calculate CRC.

Pepperdata CEO Ash Munshi on the Future of Big Data APM in 2022

Recent data shows that the global APM (application performance management) market is booming. Currently valued at $6.3 billion, the global APM industry is expected to reach $12 billion by 2026. This growth indicates the increasing importance of monitoring, diagnosing, and improving application performance. Visibility and automation is key to sustaining the growth and evolution of APM.

Cloud Budgeting: A Guide To Accurately Forecasting Cloud Spend

Are your cloud costs out of control? Do you struggle with cost overruns or going over your cloud budget? Forecasting costs accurately can help you create a realistic cloud budget you can stick to and prevent cloud bill surprises. In this guide, we’ll cover why it’s so challenging to predict cloud costs and techniques you can use to create an accurate budget your organization will be able to maintain. Table Of Contents.

Chocolate Chip Cookies And AWS Costs: What If We Ran Bakeries Like We Run SaaS Companies?

When you work in tech, there are certain truths about the holiday season you can always count on. For example, you’ll be holding your breath up until New Years waiting to see if deals will come across the line. The end-of-year planning you intended to have done by December 31, will inevitably bleed into January. And, without a doubt, you’ll spend your holidays trying to explain to your relatives what exactly it is that you do.

Big Data Observability and Continuous Tuning at Scale

Increasingly, many organizations find that their current legacy monitoring solutions are no longer adequate in today's modern IT world. These enterprises find themselves struggling to manage and understand unprecedented amounts of data. With such large amounts of data needing to be dealt with, it is no wonder why it's a struggle for enterprises to leverage it for business success. Not to mention that optimizing performance and keeping costs in line is a technical challenge they must face at the same time.