On a day-to-day basis, both engineering and product management in software companies involves constant trade-offs. Everyone has a long backlog of tasks and needs to make decisions about what to prioritize on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Figuring out what to tackle first, what to put off for later, and what to say no to is critical both to managing daily workloads as well as to creating product roadmaps that reflect what customers want.

A few years ago, we realized that spending in our AWS product test environment had jumped significantly from one month to the next. We drilled down into the issue and traced it to some RDS database instances that had been spun up to test new product features. No one realized that these expensive instances were left running after the tests were complete, and subsequently racking up charges for several months.

This month, I made the decision to join CloudZero as their new chief revenue officer — a choice I’m incredibly excited about. In the past week, a number of colleagues have asked me to share why I joined the company. After answering the question a few times, I decided to take a minute to collect my thoughts and explain why this incredible company is the next step in my career.

It’s safe to say that cost per tenant (also known as cost per customer) on AWS has been a challenging metric to obtain. Until now, your best bet has usually been to either make a best guess or build some sort of homegrown system. As of November 4, 2020, when you google “cost per tenant,” you get a few things at the top of the page. The first is a couple of blogs by AWS, where they describe an extraordinarily complex system, which you can build yourself.

Do you know how much it costs to operate your software per customer, at each pricing tier? The past six months have been highly unusual to say the least. For some companies, the disruption and shift to work from home meant 100x in usage almost overnight; for others usage completely collapsed in the same time period. These sharp swings in utilization have been disruptive to cloud unit economics. Both scenarios are risky and require extreme elasticity from the technical infrastructure.

Cloud is a driving force that is reshaping organizations to adapt their people and processes in embracing this game-changing technology. Recently, Mike Fonseca of HashiCorp published a Guide to Cloud Cost Optimization with HashiCorp Terraform, in which he details how Densify can seamlessly integrate with Terraform in to help ensure your enterprise infrastructure is always cost optimized.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive cloud computing platform, providing an array of services to manage a business’s data infrastructure to help it grow and expand. With the wide range of services provided, it has multiple options to provide you with an elastic approach to optimize your costs. However, many users struggle with controlling their expenditure due to a variety of factors. Getting a complete understanding of how to reduce your AWS operational costs may be a daunting task.

If you’re a SaaS business — especially B2B — you know that your profitability can vary significantly from customer to customer. We all have a sense of our “expensive customers,” who use the product heavily and push things to the limit. That also means there are more profitable customers. Who are they? And how do they use the product?

At CloudZero, we talk to leadership teams at SaaS and companies every day. When it comes to individual customer profitability, the vast majority of them fall into two camps: they’re either taking their best guess — or they have no idea. Typically only the largest companies - those with the resources to dedicate a 5-10 person engineering team to calculating cost - have this level of insight. And you can be sure they yield that knowledge to their competitive advantage!