Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One tracks what happened, who did it, and when it happened. The other monitors how your systems are performing so you can see why and do something about it. Knowing the difference between CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch isn’t just helpful for engineers. It’s essential for finance and leadership teams, too. That’s because the two services can quietly rack up costs in the background.

Microsoft Azure offers over 150 cloud services across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. But for many teams, it can be expensive, complex, and hard to tailor to specific needs. If the platform feels like overkill or just isn’t the right fit, this guide covers the best Azure alternatives — and what makes each one worth considering.

If you are fine using a conventional cloud cost management tool, Apptio’s Cloudability can be a helpful tool. It promises to enable DevOps, IT, and finance to optimize cloud resources for quality, speed, and cost. A large business with a high cloud spend, a team of 5-10 engineers, and a budget for expert guidance is an ideal match for Cloudability.

Managing AWS costs just a whole lot more convenient. CloudZero now integrates with Amazon Q Developer, AWS’s AI-powered engineering assistant. A natural language processor, Amazon Q Developer helps engineers write, analyze, and debug code, accelerate workload transformations, and adopt AWS best practices, enhancing developer productivity by as much as 80%.

Logging and auditing activity across your AWS environment is a must for security, governance, and compliance. Yet, between management events, data events, and optional insights, it’s easy to overspend on tracking activity without realizing it. In this guide, we’ll break down CloudTrail pricing in plain terms and see what impacts your final bill. We’ll also share immediately actionable ways to keep your CloudTrail costs in check without sacrificing full observability.

While modernizing IT infrastructure, securing data, and ensuring high availability are high priorities, optimizing AWS costs and utilization has consistently been the top priority for most companies in recent years. As a result, AWS introduced Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). AWS designed CUR to provide granular data on resource consumption and associated costs in the AWS environment.

Over the last few years, Google Cloud has grown at the fastest rate of any cloud service provider today. From 2020 to 2021, Google Cloud’s IaaS offering, GCP, grew 64%, followed by Microsoft Azure (51%) and Alibaba Cloud (42%), according to Gartner. Yet Google Cloud isn’t flawless. Here’s what we mean and some of the top Google Cloud alternatives you’ll want to consider today.

Databricks is a critical part of many organizations’ tech stacks, facilitating analytics, machine learning, and other leading-edge data engineering tasks. But when a service like Databricks becomes essential, it also tends to become a cost black hole, leading engineering teams to a quandary: How can you keep Databricks costs in check without hurting application performance? At CloudZero, we give organizations unparalleled visibility into their Databricks costs.

Zoom has an interesting concept they call a “minimum version enforcement policy.” The video conferencing platform enforces a Quarterly Lifecycle Policy, meaning that every three months, specifically in February, May, August, and November, Zoom updates the minimum required versions of its apps and SDKs. All users, system admins, and developers must be on at least the specified version to continue using the platform. Why?

Getting the right information at the right time can dramatically change the direction of your business. Yet, you may not have enough time to keep up with everything. We get it. So, our team pulled a few all-nighters (so you don’t have to), and we bring you the key SaaS statistics every SaaS leader, team, and engineer should see right now. You can dig even deeper by checking out the sources we included.

DevOps has become the backbone of modern software delivery. By breaking down the silos between development (dev) and operations (ops), DevOps teams can move faster, deploy more frequently, and maintain more reliable systems. But with this need for speed comes the necessity of visibility. And this is where DevOps dashboards impress. In this guide, we’ll cover the essentials of DevOps dashboards.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the largest cloud service provider today. With over 240 cloud products, this Amazon.com subsidiary offers cloud, on-premises, serverless, and edge computing services. But bigger isn’t always better, and we’ll share why, plus explore the top AWS alternatives to consider if you’re thinking about making a switch.

Imagine navigating a cross-country road trip using nothing but a paper map from the 1980s. Sure, you might eventually reach your destination, but you’d likely miss faster routes, real-time traffic updates, and helpful insights along the way. That’s what it can feel like for modern finance teams to rely solely on spreadsheets for complex financial modeling.

Amazon EventBridge is a powerful tool for building event-driven architectures. It’s built to connect and simplify real-time data processing and automation across your cloud stack (AWS services, customs apps, and SaaS applications). But when it comes to pricing, things can get a little tricky. Estimating EventBridge costs at scale is often daunting. There are just too many moving parts involved. That’s why in this guide, we’re breaking down what goes into an Amazon EventBridge bill.

If you provide services such as live streaming, social media networking, and analytics, you need a robust platform to speed up your read/write operations per second. Caching reduces latency by storing frequently accessed objects in faster memory (RAM or in-memory data stores instead of slower disk-based storage). Amazon ElastiCache is a managed, in-memory data store and caching service in one.

If you’re operating a SaaS company these days, chances are you’ve got at least some AI features already on the market and others in the pipeline. That also means you’ve likely encountered one of the top problems with AI in today’s market: It can be prohibitively expensive — to the point where you gamble with actually losing money rather than making a profit with the release of a new AI feature.

Millions of organizations across industries use data to improve their strategies, products, and services. Yet, there are bucketloads of cloud data platforms on the market, and picking the right one for your needs can be challenging. This in-depth comparison guide will help you decide on the data clouds offered by Snowflake vs. AWS vs. Azure.

Spring is unfolding, and your event calendar is about to be overflowing with new FinOps get-togethers. Plus, we’ve got some cloud cost announcements from a couple of the major providers that could affect your bill and your FinOps strategy. Here’s the top news from March 2025 and upcoming events you won’t want to miss.

At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice that brings together finance, technology, and business teams to manage and optimize cloud spending. For SaaS companies, where cloud infrastructure is integral to operations, FinOps practices directly impact the bottom line. But as with any emerging discipline, the big question is: Is a FinOps certification truly worth the time and financial investment?

AWS is one of the most popular public cloud platforms, offering over 240 cloud services. Despite the cloud provider’s efforts to make its tools easy to use, managing the vast array of AWS resources and services can be challenging. For example, AWS environments require continuous monitoring to determine what changes need to be made to reduce costs, improve performance, and secure your systems. This is where AWS monitoring tools, services, and best practices can help.

For data professionals interested in data modeling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, Databricks offers a robust cloud data platform. The Databricks Lakehouse combines data lake and data warehouse capabilities in one architecture. This makes Databricks particularly suitable for building sophisticated data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) models. Plus, Databricks claims its lakehouse is up to 12X cheaper than traditional alternatives.

At CloudZero, we drink deeply of our own champagne. We consider ourselves customer zero, and use our product to its maximum potential, to reduce wasteful spending and improve our unit economics. We even use our software to drive meaningful board discussions (with help from a slide template you can download here).