Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2023

Agile Vs. DevOps: 7 Most Common Misconceptions

DevOps and Agile are some of the most prominent concepts in modern IT. Agile emerged at the turn of the century to help development teams become more efficient than with previous approaches. Several years later, around 2010, DevOps emerged as we know it today to enable development and operations teams to deliver better software products, more quickly, and together. These two approaches have a lot in common, including inflated expectations.

5 Ways To Find Immediate Cloud Cost Savings Opportunities

At CloudZero, we’re always talking about different ways you can save money and increase your cloud cost efficiency with our platform. From choosing the best provider discounts for your situation to spotting cost trends that have gone off the rails or boosting the metrics that are most important to investors, we’ve discussed numerous ways you can use CloudZero to your company’s financial advantage.

Why Cost Optimization Should Be More Like Pulling Levers, Not Using Scissors

The cloud, as we know it today, was created as recently as 2006. For most of its lifespan since then, companies have been throwing money at cloud services with abandon. The competitive edge gained by having the newest, best, and most powerful tools at their disposal made it worthwhile for companies to spend ever-increasing amounts without too much worry.

Maximizing ROI By Reducing Cost of Downstream Observability Platforms With BindPlane OP

When engaging with potential customers, we are often asked “how can we reduce spend on our observability platform like Splunk or Data Dog and simultaneously justify the cost of BindPlane OP?” Let’s dive in and see how the powerful capabilities of BindPlane OP can reduce your total ingest, and get a positive ROI on your BindPlane OP investment.

Snowflake Review: Why CloudZero Went With Snowflake

Every day, CloudZero helps SaaS companies understand their cloud environments and take consistent steps forward on the journey to cloud cost maturity. We discuss this a lot on our blog. What we talk about far less frequently is our own journey. One of the reasons CloudZero can help other businesses grow, change, and adapt is because we know what it’s like to shift strategies and try new things that are a little bit scary or unknown.

Snowflake Vs. AWS Vs. Azure: Which Should You Use?

Millions of organizations, across every industry, use data to improve strategies, products, and services. Yet, there are bucketloads of cloud data platforms on the market. Picking the right one for your needs can be a challenge. This in-depth comparison guide will help you decide between the data clouds that Snowflake, AWS, and Azure offer.

Understanding spot pricing trends for a resilient and cost-efficient cloud

Now more than ever our customers are asking us for ways to reduce their public cloud spend. Customers are also asking us whether spot instances are still providing the high level of discount that they always have. The reality is that spot instance pricing is still very much based on supply and demand. Excess capacity from the cloud provider means availability can change within minutes. Therefore, you might see pricing for a particular market increase for a few months and then dip shortly thereafter.

Avoid Azure migration cost overruns with Datadog Cloud Cost Management

Migrating your on-prem applications to Azure can help you improve scalability, reliability, and security. It can also help reduce costs and free your engineering teams to focus on innovation and performance optimization. But it can be hard to understand Azure costs as they evolve during your migration and to see how they correlate with your resource utilization once you’re up and running in Azure.

Why Traditional Cloud Cost Optimization Isn't Enough

The cloud holds such promise. It’s the promise of near-infinite scalability, power, and growth potential. Companies switching to the cloud, especially in the early days of the 2010s, were seduced by the possibilities of what could happen if they just spent a little more, raced against their competitors a little faster, or achieved just a bit more product functionality. Could they be the next Twitter? The next Uber? Or something even bigger and better than what had come before?

GCP Storage Pricing: The No BS Guide To GCP Storage Costs

At CloudZero, we believe that you should be able to see where your cloud spend goes. By doing this, you can pinpoint who, why, and what is driving your cloud costs. With this insight, you can more easily make informed decisions, such as reduce unnecessary spend or increase investment where you can earn more. In that regard, we recently covered Azure Storage pricing and Amazon S3 pricing. As a continuation of our pricing series, here's a bookmarkable guide to Google Cloud Storage pricing.

Amazon S3 Cost Optimization: 12+ Ways To Optimize Your S3 Costs

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud storage platform that provides highly scalable, low-latency, and relatively affordable cloud storage. Plus, developers can use S3 to save, archive, and retrieve data anywhere on the web at any time with a user-friendly web interface. Amazon S3 is a simple key-based object store you can use to store any type of data, structured or unstructured.

Would You Notice If A Feature Was Costing Your SaaS Company Too Much?

It’s a fact of life within the SaaS world that some features will perform better or worse than others in terms of costs versus revenue. If it were possible to develop every single new release in a way that it would flawlessly maintain desired profit margins, everyone would be doing it. What separates the major players from companies that struggle year after year is how they monitor and respond to changing circumstances as they arise, and whether they learn from past mistakes.

11 Top Cloud Service Providers Globally In 2023

We recently explored what the cloud is and how it has evolved over 60 years. Yet, cloud computing emerged into what it is today in 2002, when Amazon, the e-commerce giant, sought a more efficient way to expand its online marketplace. So, it is not surprising that the company's cloud services subsidiary (AWS), which launched in 2006, is the largest Cloud Service Provider (CSP) today. This CSP marketshare guide shares the details of the cloud infrastructure market, the dominant players, and more, including.

Reducing the cost of cloud: Tips for reducing your spend at any cloud provider

Spiraling costs are causing organizations to look for ways to reduce their monthly spend – hidden charges and unexpected bills are surprises that CFOs can no longer afford. With current costs from hyperscaler cloud providers skyrocketing, many are now asking whether going cloud-native is the right move for them. There are, however, a number of tips and tricks that you can action today that will help you reduce your cloud bill at any provider.

Live Event - Cloud Costs Optimization

Qovery is a platform delivering Environments as a Service in your Cloud, where you can build, deploy and test in production-like environments. Qovery turns app deployment and environment provisioning on AWS a breeze. Developers can instantly spin up production-like environments and start shipping in seconds. Join Romaric (CEO at Qovery) to see how you can optimize your cloud costs with the help of Qovery and its partnerships.

Introducing Adaptive Metrics: A new cost management feature in Grafana Cloud

You’ve convinced your organization that cloud native is the way forward. You’ve championed Kubernetes and sworn by Prometheus. You’ve onboarded multiple teams to your centralized observability platform. Then you open your latest bill and see a lot of commas in your invoice, and a sinking feeling sets in. Sound familiar? We’re keenly aware of the pain this can bring. As metric cardinality grows in cloud native environments, so does the cost to store and retrieve the data.

4 Low-Effort Tactics That Saved CloudZero Over $2M In 2023

Whether or not you take the oft-quoted statistic that 30% of companies’ cloud spend as gospel, one thing is for sure: Companies have been spending recklessly in the cloud ever since its inception. For (fairly) good reason — companies wanted to perfect their products and snatch up market share before an even more reckless spender did. But the chickens of overindulgence are finally coming home to roost.

Cloud Cost Management Demo

Growing cloud costs are a new constraint and challenge for many DevOps, FinOps, and Cloud Platform teams. Cloud Cost Management delivers granular cost data, scoped to the services developers own, so that engineers can take action on cost data. By unifying cost and observability data, engineering teams can quickly understand the root cause of cost changes, identify wasteful spend in their environment, and empower everyone across their organization to become a cost owner.

AWS Vs. Azure Vs. Google Cloud: Which One Should You Use?

Combined, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) control 67% of the global cloud computing services market. That’s a big deal, but not for obvious reasons. Here's the deal. Azure, AWS, and GCP all have vast experience managing cloud infrastructure. This can mean better services, engineering training, and superior technical support for you. In addition, they have the resources to drive innovation and back up your data worldwide.

AWS Redshift 101: What Is It and When Should You Use It?

Amazon Redshift processes petabytes of data, making it one of the most popular data warehousing solutions on the market. It uses Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) technology to process massive volumes of data at lightning speeds. Plus, Redshift costs a fraction of the cost of other data platforms. This guide will provide a deeper understanding of Redshift to help you determine whether it's the best data warehouse solution for your organization. Table Of Contents.

Why Unit Economics Are The Key To Unlocking Forecasting

In SaaS companies, engineers are the biggest influencers to cloud costs. They choose the infrastructure, build the products, and produce the code. Unfortunately, having this power means engineering managers are often asked to predict cloud spend months or even years into the future. An executive or a head of finance might approach the engineering head and ask how much the company will spend on cloud costs next year, thinking he or she should naturally have the answer.