You're not alone if you have trouble visualizing, measuring, and controlling your IT costs. Whether public or private, cloud computing can add to the cost problem. That’s because cloud computing offers on-demand resources, so misconfigured infrastructure, an overzealous engineer, or a blindsided operations team can do something that leads to a surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. But not so fast. What is cost optimization, and why is it different from IT cost reduction?

Organizations receive high monthly bills from cloud providers with no way of determining why the number changes from month to month or how to accurately predict future spend. More importantly, there is little information to provide visibility if cloud resources are being deployed efficiently or if spend is correlated to business performance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides three types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances; On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances (RIs), and Spot Instances. EC2 On-Demand instances are the default and most expensive instances. RIs and Spot instances offer discounts of up to 72% and 90% on On-Demand instances, respectively. The Reserved Instances are long-term commitments that guarantee you compute power for a year or three. Spot instances fluctuate in price and availability constantly.

Today's technology companies need to release quality features quickly and put them in users' hands even quicker. According to the State of DevOps Report, organizations with CI/CD tools deploy 208X more often and have a 106X shorter lead time than organizations without one. You can release software with minimal downtime for your customers when you use robust continuous deployment software.

In the past couple of months, after nearly a decade of huge returns and steady growth, the tech industry has officially slowed down. Companies are tightening their belts — laying off employees, freezing spending, and lowering budgets. If you work in tech right now, it’s likely you’ve felt it.

DevOps helps developers and operators work together to create high-quality software quickly. DevOps is a modern software development philosophy that uses various tools, processes, and people to get ideal results rapidly. As a result, companies that use DevOps satisfy customer needs, achieving a competitive advantage.

The Snowflake data cloud provides storage, reporting, and analytics for organizations that rely on their data to run their day-to-day operations. Snowflake has become a top data warehouse solution for its manageability, superior scalability, always-on data security, advanced analytics, and robust accessibility since its launch from stealth mode in 2014. But Snowflake isn't perfect. For example, Snowflake is a cloud-only solution, so it might not be the best choice for organizations with on-premises data.

Whether you’re a product manager, a marketing organization, or in finance, you’re probably using the cloud in some way. But many businesses are still immature when it comes to building systems in the cloud, especially when it comes to how they use their financial resources. Here, CloudZero founder and CTO Erik Peterson breaks down the responsibility of using the cloud, how to break down the costs of cloud computing, and what you need to do to change the conversation from cost to profit.

One of the best ways to achieve efficient product development is to make sure everyone involved with a project is on the same page, working toward the same ultimate goals. However, this is harder to do than it sounds. Engineering and product teams bring very different priorities to the table, and establishing which priorities to focus on first often becomes a matter of debate.

Companies of all sizes can take advantage of AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) to save money on the price of standard Amazon EC2 On-Demand instances. To receive the discounted rate associated with AWS Reserved Instances, you must commit to a year or three years of usage. In exchange, you can save up to 75% off the On-Demand price.