Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2021

Finance: Why Getting Answers From Engineering About Your AWS Bill Is So Difficult

It’s no secret that AWS bills are confusing. But it’s particularly difficult for the team who actually writes the check to Amazon for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — yet has never personally seen what the inside of the AWS portal looks like (and probably never will).

7 Reasons Engineering and DevOps Teams Love CloudZero

CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence solution that puts engineering in control of cloud cost. We set out to disrupt the cost management and optimization space by building a solution that was designed around the way engineers work — so cost becomes a tradeoff during the software development process, rather than a massive disruption. We often get asked what actually makes us such an engineering-friendly solution? Well, here are seven reasons why engineering and DevOps teams love CloudZero.

How Do You Measure Technical Debt? (and What To Do About It)

Technical debt is an important — but often unclear — concept for engineering teams. In software development, technical debt, also called code debt or tech debt, is defined as the cost of refactoring a piece of code or system to keep it working efficiently. It can be caused by outdated architecture, a change in requirements, or the result of choosing an easier solution instead of a better, but more difficult one.

The Top 6 CloudHealth Alternatives Compared (Updated 2021)

As a cloud cost intelligence solution, we often get asked where we fit in the cloud cost universe — and whether or not we’re an alternative to CloudHealth. The short answer is: it depends. The landscape of cloud cost tools is busy, with lots of different solutions that take different approaches to helping companies optimize their cloud costs. To help answer this question, we thought we’d lay out the cloud cost landscape as we see it.

How CloudZero Built an Engineering Culture of Cost Autonomy

As a cloud cost intelligence company, we often like to say “every line of code is a buying decision”. If you’re running on AWS or one of the other big cloud providers, you know that a simple decision about how to architect an application can have a significant impact on your future cost of goods sold (COGS). However, in my experience, many engineering teams don’t discuss cost — at least not until it’s already become a problem.

Should You Build Your Own Cloud Cost Optimization Tool? 3 Questions To Ask Yourself

This is a follow up to a blog series where we explore DIY cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimization tools. In the first, we investigated how Lyft, Netflix, Segment, Expedia, and Slack built theirs. Check it out here. “Build versus buy” is the eternal question for every engineering and DevOps team setting out to solve a technical problem. In the cloud cost monitoring and optimization world, both options can take on many forms.