Typically, startup founders and executives must meet with their board of directors each quarter to review the progress of the company. They may talk about broad topics such as total costs and total revenue, and use these numbers as a guide to determine which moves the company should make in the near future. Often missing from the conversation, however, is a clear and detailed discussion of SaaS metrics.

It can be a challenge to measure costs within a SaaS company. While a business with physical inventory can count the number of items sitting on the shelf and the money needed to create, store, and ship those items, operating within the cloud means SaaS companies have to measure their costs through a layer of abstraction. The number of users a given product supports and the resources needed to keep that product up and running could change by the minute.

At CloudZero, the thing we do better than any other cost solution is connect the dots between cloud cost and your businesses. While other solutions offer reporting and dashboards that answer, “How much did we spend?”, CloudZero also enables you to answer “Why?”. Was it because you onboarded a new customer? Did your team push new code? Or did usage of a feature tick up after some clever UX adjustments?

The Kubernetes platform is the standard for orchestrating containerized applications. It’s ideal for large applications running on distributed instances. The problem is that monitoring Kubernetes infrastructure can be notoriously challenging. In this guide, we'll cover Kubernetes monitoring in more detail, including what Kubernetes metrics to track to improve visibility and control over your K8s containers, apps, microservices, etc.

Identifying great business optimization opportunities is tougher than it seems. You often need to weigh the projected revenue and costs of taking a new path against the potential opportunity costs of not taking that path. Not only is this an apples-to-oranges comparison, but also a “what if” scenario riddled with variables. For instance, what if slashing costs makes the customer experience so much slower and more frustrating that sales decline and you wind up losing revenue?

Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the two most popular cloud providers today. They both offer a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, you'll find products covering multiple computing areas, such as compute, storage, analytics, and networking. You can also deploy AWS or Azure services in the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid setup.

Setting clear and attainable goals for cloud cost optimization keeps your whole organization on track and working toward a common end. The emphasis here is on clear and attainable. In other words, your team must know where they are headed and have full confidence that they can get there.

SaaS companies are known for their strong margins. With gross margins typically in the 60-90% range, even SaaS companies with comparatively weaker margins have a compelling business model when compared with most other industries. Nonetheless, even a few percentage points of margin can have a huge impact on a company’s valuation and overall success. This chart, taken from a great article by Villi Iltche at Two Sigma Ventures, shows the correlation between gross margins and valuation.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) eases deploying and running Kubernetes on the AWS platform. A fully managed Kubernetes service, EKS eliminates the need to install, configure, or maintain Kubernetes nodes or control planes on your own. With EKS, you can leverage the performance, scalability, and availability of AWS infrastructure, along with integrations with multiple AWS compute, storage, security, serverless, and networking services.

Things are changing. Technology differences between serverless and container-based systems are rapidly blurring. In 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) enabled AWS Lambda to package and deploy functions as container images, instead of bundling all of a function’s code and dependencies in a.zip file. Today, more organizations are increasingly deploying Lambda functions as Docker container images. These companies want to reap the benefits of serverless computing, containers, and container orchestration.

Whether you’re new to Kubernetes or a bona fide wizard, it may seem like getting any meaningful cost data out of it is a miracle. This is because many organizations that migrate to Kubernetes unwittingly step into the Black Box of Kubernetes Spend. In pre-Kubernetes life, teams could allocate costs by tagging resources.

Although container-related technology existed before 2013, Docker revolutionized and propelled it into the mainstream. Using Docker, developers could automatically create containers from application source code, share libraries, and reuse containers. Docker enables you to track container image versions, roll back to an earlier iteration, and track who built a specific one. You can even upload only the deltas between two versions.

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) enables Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to manage, operate, and scale their databases. A managed service, RDS provides seven database engines and multiple instance sizes and types for working with relational databases. AWS also claims RDS can match the performance, scalability, and availability of commercial databases for a tenth of the price. Is this true, and how much does Amazon RDS cost really? This guide explains how Amazon RDS pricing works.

Business leaders frequently need to make decisions that could impact the entire future of a company. Armed with pages of data and financial reports, many executives choose to slash costs, double efforts on certain products over others, or otherwise forge ahead with major decisions about cloud usage, spending, and overall business strategy. Great choices could mean huge profits, but unwise choices could spell doom for the business as a whole.