Have you been bitten by unexpected costs in the cloud? Whether you are all in with serverless, cloud-native services, on demand and reserved instances, or you build systems and applications with all those things, it is very likely you have had a bad experience with unexpected costs. Why is that? Let me ask you, what is your DevOps tool for observing cost?

Reserved instances are one of those things that, when you first hear about them, you say, “Wow! I could save a lot of money!” And then you start to try and figure out how many you need? What sizes? Which operating systems? In which regions? Should they be convertible? Should I choose a 1-year or 3-year term? All up-front, partial up-front, or no up-front? How much compute am I actually going to need over that term?

If it hasn’t happened already, someone in your organization will soon ask you to explain your AWS bill. Depending on the complexity of your cloud environment, you will consider the bill to be something between a riddle and an incomprehensible and unbreakable code. We know, we’ve been there.

The year is 2020 and you are responsible for ensuring the efficient and reliable operations of millions of dollars of cloud computing infrastructure. Things have changed a lot in the past few years, even more so from the days when you first moved from on-premise and into AWS.