Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

5 Cloud Tagging Best Practices Every SaaS Company Should Use

Ask anyone who’s managing any cloud environment of any size, and they will undoubtedly bring up the stress they experience on a regular basis over tags. Since the dawn of cloud, every cloud user has struggled with the challenge of tagging — essentially the only mechanism that exists for you to apply metadata to your cloud environment. The fact that tags themselves are an imperfect tool — both inflexible and hard to manage — makes no difference.

How To Calculate TCO On AWS: A Step-By-Step Guide

Organizations often assume that switching to Amazon Web Services (AWS) will automatically reduce their on-premises spending. Certainly, cloud-based services like AWS' Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can offer significant cost savings. Yet overspending on AWS is quite common. How can you tell if moving to AWS is the right decision? What figures would you use to quantify and justify that choice to decision-makers? Enter Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on AWS.

7 AWS Migration Strategies That Can Help Prevent Overspending

Many companies don’t know where to begin when migrating to AWS. Some worry their data will leak, while others don't know the most efficient migration strategy for AWS. Another group worries about overspending when moving to AWS. The migration strategy involved plays a crucial part in all of these concerns. This guide will discuss more than just AWS cloud migration strategies.

Introducing CloudZero Budgets: Improve Cost Predictability And Eliminate Surprises

The best budgets aren't roadblocks. They're guardrails: boundaries for quick, collaborative work. Historically, when finance and engineering teams have discussed cloud cost, they’ve run into an obstacle: They don’t speak the same language. At the end of each month, finance gets an ever-changing cloud bill, and engineering explains that, whatever the total, it represents what they need to do their work. Stalemate.

The 10 Best AWS Migration Tools (Updated 2022)

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud can be arduous and time-consuming. A cloud migration would take years if engineers manually moved data from assessment through mobilization and migration phases. An effective cloud migration also requires adequate data encryption, fast data transfer speeds, and constant monitoring. Migrating workloads to AWS requires you to monitor costs in real-time as well to avoid overspending.

Why COGS Isn't The Most Relevant Cost Metric For SaaS Companies

For most SaaS companies, COGS (which stands for cost of goods sold) is used to calculate gross margin and profit. COGS is an accepted term with a specific definition under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — and is widely used as part of calculations to gauge the health and valuation of a company. Like many accounting practices, COGS stems from the industrial era, when most businesses were concerned with the creation of physical goods.

6 Actionable Ways To Improve Your Cloud Efficiency

With incredibly complex cloud architecture — that may even includes Kubernetes and multi-tenant infrastructure — organizations are finding it hard to measure and monitor the performance and cost of their cloud environments. To stay competitive, organizations should aim to be as efficient as possible — which can help companies to lower costs, increase margins, and improve cloud efficiency.

9 Cloud FinOps Challenges - And The Solutions To Overcome Them

Companies migrate to the cloud to become more productive, respond to market changes, and be flexible — while spending less on cloud infrastructure. But there is one thing that many cloud-based organizations have learned: Cloud costs add up. Fast. As a result, 71% of cloud financial management teams doubt they will achieve expected results at the expected time or at all. Only 29% of cloud FinOps teams expect to achieve their cloud goals.

Why Serverless? The Next Wave Of Cloud Cost Optimization

Traditionally, applications are developed and deployed on local servers managed by developers. This keeps the whole process under the control of one development team that is responsible for keeping the system running smoothly. With serverless computing, however, the server management and code execution within applications takes place remotely, under the control of the cloud service provider rather than an in-house development team.

How To Calculate Customer Retention Cost: The Hidden SaaS Metric

You may have heard that keeping an existing customer is five times cheaper than acquiring a new one. But that isn't always true. “Hidden costs” often accompany customer retention, loyalty, and increasing "share of customer". Could you be spending more on retaining customers than on winning new ones? This quick guide will walk you through the meaning of Customer Retention Cost (CRC), why it's important to calculate, and how to calculate CRC.

Cloud Budgeting: A Guide To Accurately Forecasting Cloud Spend

Are your cloud costs out of control? Do you struggle with cost overruns or going over your cloud budget? Forecasting costs accurately can help you create a realistic cloud budget you can stick to and prevent cloud bill surprises. In this guide, we’ll cover why it’s so challenging to predict cloud costs and techniques you can use to create an accurate budget your organization will be able to maintain. Table Of Contents.

Chocolate Chip Cookies And AWS Costs: What If We Ran Bakeries Like We Run SaaS Companies?

When you work in tech, there are certain truths about the holiday season you can always count on. For example, you’ll be holding your breath up until New Years waiting to see if deals will come across the line. The end-of-year planning you intended to have done by December 31, will inevitably bleed into January. And, without a doubt, you’ll spend your holidays trying to explain to your relatives what exactly it is that you do.