Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) is an important milestone in every company’s cloud computing journey. While it is usually not the first milestone — which is focused on delivering value to customers — this milestone is reached as the company grows and scales. Turning ad-hoc cloud initiatives into a company-wide strategy, the CCOE helps the business to manage the cloud process and adopt best practices.

As businesses evolve thanks to technology advances, so must the role of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). With an ever-growing list of financials to manage, such as payroll, operating expenses, IT and software expenses, and more, CFOs have to find the right processes and choose the right tools to get the cost data they need to make informed decisions and ensure profitability for their company.

Automation in the cloud has a number of benefits that helps you save time and eliminate human error. Cloud automation can help you innovate faster because it frees up your engineering team to focus on innovation — rather than repetitive tasks. It can also help you save money by scaling resources up and down to match your computing needs and budget. But is this actually cloud automation or is it cloud orchestration?

Rolled out in 2011, AWS ElastiCache has grown to become one of the most prominent Amazon services among developers. So much so that in the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, one of its fully-managed engines was voted by developers as the most loved database. On the flip side, however, AWS ElastiCache happens to be infamous for its high costs. Although it offers a flexible pricing system that charges you only for what you use, the usage bill can get pretty high for some users.

As a cloud cost intelligence platform, we spend nearly every day talking to companies about their cloud cost — and there’s something we’ve noticed — people don’t generally have the warm and fuzzies for their cloud cost management tools. You know, the ones that have been around for a while, that you use to build reports about your cloud spend? We won’t refer to them by name. These popular tools have really given the whole category a bit of a bad rap.