Cost management in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be complex. It's a lot like costs in Azure or AWS. Often, companies don't know where to begin when they receive 20-page invoices GCP billing tools can be unfamiliar, especially to users coming from a different cloud provider. But the platform continues to simplify its cost monitoring and billing tools.

When you’re operating in the cloud, making the right decisions is not always easy because there’s a lot of ground to cover, especially with regard to cost. The elastic nature of cloud infrastructure means your costs could quickly spiral out of control if you don’t have guardrails in place to help keep costs down. Properly managing your cloud costs is important, especially for SaaS companies. Cloud spend impacts your COGS, which in turn affects revenue and valuation.

Managing containerized applications or microservices can be difficult. It is even more demanding and error-prone if you do it manually. So, what’s the alternative? Container orchestration. Container orchestration is an automation technology that helps engineers coordinate when containers start and stop, schedule and execute tasks, manage failovers, and perform recovery processes. The technology helps automate these tasks throughout a container's lifecycle.

Great leaders know how to think big. As a VPE or CTO, your leadership role puts you in a position to make important changes and guide policy. But as a technical leader of your company, you’re almost always incredibly busy. It’s impossible to handle every single demand on any given day, which makes prioritization of tasks an important part of your daily decision-making. How do you know you’re making the right choices and working on the items that will make the largest impact?

Toward the end of Q1, 2022, survey findings reported that Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services had, for the first time, eclipsed Amazon Web Services (AWS) in some enterprise categories. According to the respondents, more enterprises preferred Azure because it integrates well with the many Microsoft products they already use. A second reason was that Azure is suitable for running on-premises and at the edge. Also, some organizations use Microsoft Azure to avoid vendor lock-in to AWS.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we live in a perfect world. In that world, you could check your company’s cloud bills and financial reports and find cleanly organized categories of spending that help you instantly understand where your money is going and why. Your engineers would meticulously label every spend item with useful metadata tags so you can clearly see which costs have increased and which are most affecting your bottom line.

Cloud migration efforts continue to grow today as organizations move into a post-pandemic work environment. According to McKinsey & Company, by 2024, most enterprises aspire to have $8 out of every $10 for IT hosting go toward the cloud. In a survey by Morgan Stanley, CIOs say cloud computing will see the highest rate of IT spending growth in 2022.

Picking the right AWS instance is challenging because you have to match the ever-changing resource usage patterns of your apps with the 500+ AWS instance types, and the result is over-provisioning and waste. Nearly one-third of businesses exceed their cloud budgets by as much as 40%, in part due to poorly sized instances.

You work hard to deliver a great product to your target market. Yet, when it’s time to price your worth, it’s challenging to set a fair pricing strategy, model, or amount. This anxiety is understandable. If you charge too much, you could lose potential and existing customers. If you are a start-up, this bad first impression can be detrimental to your growth. For larger businesses, some customers may feel you are losing touch and switch to newer or veteran competitors.

In the beginning of cloud computing, before the earliest cost tools came along to give companies a glimpse into their spending, most businesses found it hard to determine where their cloud budget was going. The money disappeared into the black hole of the cloud service provider, and in exchange, the business received cloud services. Achieving any sort of granularity beyond that was next to impossible.

Apptio announced on May 31, 2019, that it had acquired Cloudability, hoping to strengthen its mission through its new product. Cloudability is a multi-cloud financial management platform for enterprises looking for a more unified way to view, understand, and act on cloud cost insight. Cloudability lets enterprises analyze cloud costs across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Apptio Cloudability provides FinOps capabilities as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

AWS did not intend to build Amazon EKS; it simply had to. Kubernetes adoption beamed light years ahead of AWS' own managed container orchestration service. This forced AWS to develop a managed service to accommodate customers who wanted to use upstream Kubernetes but did not want to do the management themselves. As soon as AWS got around to it, it knocked the Kubernetes-based container management service out of the park.

Before we jump into cloud cost optimization, let us address the elephant in the room. Businesses are moving to the cloud but are struggling with unpredictable cloud bills. If you are a business owner who has moved to the cloud recently, you need to understand each cloud touchpoint and get a transparent view of your cloud services. When it comes to cloud cost optimization, there are many tools and techniques that organizations can adopt. Most of these can only take you so far.

The job of a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professional is to oversee the building of financial models, track budgets, and partner with stakeholders across their organization to make better decisions. For FP&A professionals in charge of partnering with engineering and product organizations, this means understanding how investments in innovation, from software purchases to headcount, are driving business outcomes. Like any team in an organization, this comes with its own unique set of challenges.