Ever since its release in September 2014, Kubernetes has been equally powerful and meme-able in the engineering world. For all the magic of its container orchestration and compute resource management, it’s also mysterious and, to many, confounding — especially when it comes time to pay for it. As we’ve written before, migrating to Kubernetes often means losing cost visibility.

You’re a savvy SaaS business leader, so you already know the importance of keeping costs low to maximize your margins. What you might not have considered, however, is how tracking unit cost in your cloud spend data can help you achieve optimizations far beyond what you’d get with traditional cost-cutting methods. Keep reading to learn how cloud spend unit costs can drive savings you never knew were possible.

When operating in the cloud, one of the key decisions to make is about which type of architecture to adopt for your business and customer data. This is because choosing cost-effective architecture is key to building profitable SaaS software. Single-tenant and multi-tenant cloud environments are the options to consider. Both types of architecture have security and privacy implications. There’s also the issue of cost, which differs significantly depending on the architecting model you adopt.

As many companies shift from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud computing, they are also rethinking how they handle cloud costs — from accounting to tax reporting. Computing costs are predictable and relatively fixed in traditional IT environments. An organization purchases computing capacity upfront and uses it over time. The total cost of ownership is fairly easier to calculate with this setup. By contrast, cloud computing operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no upfront payments.

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) offers a variety of database instances, which can be confusing at first. In this guide, we'll clarify what each RDS instance class, family, type, and size means in under 15 minutes. Let's start at the beginning.

Cloud computing is among the roles occupied by 9.1 million people in the tech industry. With “tech jobs” appearing in 255,000 Google monthly searches and tech job listings increasing by 25% in the U.S., which are the best cities to pursue a career in tech?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 fully-featured services. AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Lambda, and the AWS Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are some of the most critical services you should become familiar with. We’ve covered Amazon ECS vs. EKS vs. Fargate for managing and deploying containers before. In this guide, we'll explain how Amazon EC2, Lambda, ECS, and S3 compare and when you’ll want to use each.

A decade after launching Reserved Instances (RIs), Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Savings Plans as a more flexible alternative to RIs. AWS Savings Plans are not meant to replace Reserved Instances; they are complementary. SPs and RIs have some significant differences that make each better suited to specific uses. As an example, while Savings Plans are applicable to both EC2 and Fargate instances, RIs are only applicable to EC2 instances. This guide will cover.

Kubernetes, or K8s, is an open-source, portable, and scalable container orchestration platform. With K8s, you can reliably manage distributed systems for your applications, enabling declarative configuration and automatic deployment. Yet, K8s can be resource-intensive and costly, with a rather steep learning curve. But in 2019, a lighter, faster, and potentially more cost-effective alternative appeared: K3s. Still, K3s is not a magic wand that works for all Kubernetes deployments.

In the last couple years, the SaaS world has undergone a paradigm shift with regard to cloud spending. As macroeconomic conditions shift from “peachy” to “moldy,” as SaaS grows increasingly crowded, as company valuations face new pressure, and as venture funding cools down, companies are looking to reduce — or in industry jargon, “optimize” — their cloud spending as much as possible, as soon as possible.