Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2023

Flexera Vs. CloudHealth: An In-Depth Comparison

VMware’s CloudHealth and Flexera market themselves as two of the best cloud management platforms today. For organizations with on-premises, cloud, and SaaS operations, both offer a wide range of enterprise-level tools and capabilities. Additionally, both companies offer cloud security, compliance, and governance solutions. Yet, each cloud governance platform has its strengths. Each has its tradeoffs. So, before you choose Flexera or CloudHealth, here’s what you need to know.

What Is Cloud Scalability? Benefits And Tips For Every Organization

One of the major benefits of choosing the cloud over on-premise architecture is the ability to easily and quickly scale — but what does scalability mean in cloud computing? If your business is in the process of growing, it’s important to know your technology options so you can make informed decisions on how to scale. In this article, we cover scalability in cloud computing, its benefits, and more. Let’s get to it!

Why Hourly Granularity Is Necessary For Effective Cloud Cost Management

Cloud spenders of all sizes, but particularly those who have exceeded the $50,000 a month benchmark, know how challenging it can be to extract meaningful insights from their spend environments. As a digital-native company grows, its spend environment naturally gets more complicated — and without a strong organizational framework, what could be a treasure trove of data turns into a rat’s nest of semi-organized, confounding figures.

6 Ways To Get Engineers More Involved In Cloud Costs

As a SaaS leader, you probably understand how crucial it is to get your engineers to make strategic cloud cost decisions. After all, your engineers are responsible for most of the cloud operating costs within your company. Unfortunately, getting engineers to care about costs isn’t always intuitive or easy. In fact, it’s commonly thought to be one of the most difficult challenges faced by SaaS leaders and FinOps specialists.

One spot for FinOps: Introducing Cost Intelligence and Billing Engine

Wherever you are on your cloud journey, you’re likely under pressure to cut or at least control your cloud spend. You may be undertaking “quick fix” cost cutting tactics such as turning off resources or moving workloads to cheaper services. But, as you may be finding out, tactical, reactive cost management activities generally only work for the short term and do not solve systemic inefficiencies that only increase over time if not addressed.

A Beginner-Friendly Guide To Azure Cloud Management

As a provider of over 200 cloud products and services, Microsoft Azure provides most of the capabilities you need to manage your cloud workloads. While this breadth of services can be beneficial, it can also create complexity issues, such as reducing cloud cost visibility and increasing security blind spots. Proper Azure cloud management can change this. In this snackable guide, we’ll share what Azure cloud management is, the key tools you need to manage your Azure environment, and more.

A Quick Guide To Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Tools

Over the past few years, Google has grown its cloud services to include more than 100 products and services. Today, Google Cloud rubs shoulders with the top two cloud service providers. Yet, managing a Google Cloud environment has become increasingly challenging as the platform expands its GCP tools. It’s not just Google Cloud. The same is true today for other leading public cloud providers. To its credit, Google Cloud provides plenty of tools to help you get the most out of the platform.

15 Crucial Azure Tools You Need To Know Now

What Does Microsoft Azure Do? Azure Development Tools Azure Cost And Resource Management Tools Azure Security Tools Azure Monitoring And Reporting Tools How To Choose The Best Azure Tools For Your Business View The People, Products, And Processes That Drive Your Cloud Spend With CloudZero Modern cloud environments can be challenging to manage. It doesn’t have to be that way if you use the right tools.

Engineering-Led Optimization: How To Proactively Manage Cloud Costs Without Slowing Down Innovation

How Engineering-Led Optimization Works Achieve Cloud Efficiency Without Slowing Down Innovation Historically, cloud cost optimization has been the responsibility of finance teams. Engineers have bought what they claim to need to build top-notch software; finance teams have gotten (and paid) the bill; neither has had an in-depth understanding of what the other is doing.

5 Simple Steps to Reduce Your AWS S3 Bill

Understanding your AWS S3 billing is crucial to effectively manage and reduce your costs. Charges in AWS S3 are primarily based on three factors: the amount of data you store, the number of requests you make, and data transfer fees. Storage costs are calculated per gigabyte (GB) stored, which are tiered depending on the total size of your data. Requests costs are incurred with each put, get, or list operation on your objects, with prices varying based on the type of request.

3 Simple EC2 Strategies To Ensure Cost Efficiency

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been the leader in cloud computing for more than ten years. Despite a decade of extensive innovation, no other resource encapsulates the principles of the cloud more than one of their flagship services, Elastic Cloud Computing, also known as EC2. Through EC2, AWS is able to offer flexible and scalable virtual infrastructure that can be ‘rented’ to run applications and workloads.

Product Release Notes October 2023

The 2023 CloudZero Makeover (Rebrand) Role-Based Access Control: New Editor Role Usage Data In Analytics View Your Data By GCP Tags CostFormation® Proportional Allocation Improvements Small Bites If you’ve visited CloudZero lately, you’ve probably seen a few changes. New logo, new app, new website, new look and feel — okay, more than a few changes. What provoked the rebrand?

When AWS Won't Work: 10 AWS Alternatives Worth Considering Now

Why Consider AWS Alternatives? How To Choose The Best Cloud Service Provider For Your Business Top 10 AWS Alternatives To Consider Today Easily Understand, Control, And Optimize Your Cloud Costs Whichever Provider You Choose Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the largest cloud service provider today. With more than 240 cloud products, this Amazon.com subsidiary offers cloud, on-premises, serverless, and edge computing services.

Managing observability spend with Grafana Cloud's Cost Management Hub

Learn how Grafana Cloud helps analyze, manage and optimize observability spend from a central location called the cost management hub. The move to cloud-native architectures like K8s and Prometheus has caused an unprecedented increase in telemetry data that has resulted in observability bills skyrocketing. With Grafana Cloud and the central cost management hub, you will be able to answer any cost-related question with the tools to inspect, attribute, optimize and monitor your observability spend.

Manage log volumes, metrics cardinality, monthly bills: Explore Grafana Cloud cost management tools

As more organizations adopt observability at massive scale, they have also been grappling with rising costs. Over the past 12 months, we have been working on different solutions to help our users better understand and manage their observability stack, not to mention the bills that come with scaling it.

Why Automatic Cloud Cost Optimization Isn't Enough

As the leader of a SaaS company, you’re just as busy as you are concerned with making sure your bottom line is as healthy as possible. There’s no denying that putting some aspects of cloud cost management on autopilot is a useful strategy. Most automated cost optimization platforms — one of our favorites is ProsperOps — use advanced algorithms to identify areas where you can find provider discounts or lower-cost alternatives to the resources you’re using now.

Analyzing GCP Costs with BigQuery: A How-To Guide

Effective Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cost management is an essential aspect of cloud administration, ensuring that resources are used optimally without overspending. Utilizing BigQuery for GCP cost analysis offers a comprehensive solution to understand and control your cloud expenses. The integration of GCP billing data into BigQuery allows for real-time analysis and detailed insights into your cloud spend.

Understanding Your Cloud Bill: A Beginner's Guide

Embarking on the journey of understanding your cloud bill can initially seem daunting, but grasping a few essential concepts and familiarizing yourself with common terminology can significantly demystify the process. At its core, cloud billing is the method by which cloud service providers charge for the resources and services that your business consumes.

How Technology Revolutionizes Postage Expense Management in Business

Are you having difficulty managing postage expenses? With technological advances, even post offices are taking a cue and modernizing to help businesses track their mail spending more efficiently. You no longer need to worry about sifting through piles of paperwork or sending out obsolete, unreliable invoices - new digital platforms provide a comprehensive solution for effective postage expense management. In this blog post, we'll uncover the benefits of utilizing today's state-of-the-art technologies to make sure your business remains profitable by minimizing postage costs.

5 AWS Tagging Challenges - And How CloudZero Solves Them

As an AWS user, you know how important it is that your organization understands what you’re spending and why. AWS is a tremendously powerful resource, and when you have complete visibility into the cost efficiency of your AWS environment, you can use it to remove many of the scaling obstacles that companies faced in the past.

CloudZero's New Logo: A Commitment To Finding Order Within The Chaos

In the last decade-plus, the cloud has undergone a torrid evolution. Born in 2006, the cloud didn’t face the same speed limits on evolution that we mortals do. Within years, the cloud had gone from competitive edge to competitive necessity; within a decade, specialized services like Kubernetes, Snowflake, and Datadog had emerged to help us use it more, more flexibly, and with a more data-driven strategy. As the cloud evolved at an exponential rate, so did the costs associated with using it.

How Extole Discovered and Saved 30% By Reducing Application Waste

Not every application has wasted capacity in it—or do they? Watch Ben Smith, VP Technical Operations at Extole, discuss how he discovered that there's around 30% of application waste within every running app, and how Extole went about saving that wasted capacity.

A Simple Guide To AWS Lambda Rightsizing

AWS Lambda can be an easy-to-implement solution for those looking for serverless application deployments and operations. However, how can you be sure that you are getting the most for your money when it comes to utilizing this service? This guide will explain some of the tools and resources at your disposal — whether you’re utilizing the AWS console, trying to optimize your code and design, or a combination of the two.

Pepperdata Reduces the Cost of Amazon EMR on EKS by 42.5%

With Kubernetes emerging as the de facto operating system of the cloud, capable of running almost anything, it’s not a surprise that many enterprises are rapidly porting their Apache Spark workloads to Kubernetes. This includes migrating Amazon EMR workloads to Amazon EKS to gain the additional deployment and scaling benefits of a fully managed service like Amazon EKS.