For organizations across industries and verticals, cost optimization of the cloud is fundamental to long-lasting success in the cloud. With cloud spending at an all-time high, cloud cost optimization is critical to ensuring organizations can financially sustain large-scale, dynamic clouds. Operationalizing cloud optimization, however, has significant challenges even for experienced teams, but ignoring the directive of optimization can lead to even higher cloud spending and wasted resources.

There’s no denying that cloud adoption is accelerating at exponential rates, and as that trend takes hold across industries and across the globe, increasing attention is being focused on the strategic importance of cloud resource optimization. GigaOm’s latest Cloud Resource Optimization Radar Report highlights why organizations should consider optimization as a strategic priority from day 1, rather than something to consider as an afterthought.

When it comes to managing your team’s access and permissions to cloud environments, it’s important to grant the right permissions to your users—no less and no more than they need. Different teams can require different levels of access, for example cloud budget managers and users will require different permissions than the DevOps engineers who are operating and managing the cloud on a daily basis.

With our recent announcement regarding the general availability of Ocean for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), I decided to migrate one of our production services. The service was already running on AKS, but will now be managed by Spot’s Ocean for AKS. TL;DR: The results are pretty cool, as I was able to cut 82% out of the existing spending for this AKS cluster. You can see the results in the screen capture below.

Ocean automates cloud infrastructure for containers. It continuously analyzes how your containers are using infrastructure, automatically scaling compute resources to maximize utilization without sacrificing availability. Ocean shuffles workloads and then scales down underutilized nodes to ensure everything runs at the lowest cost.