Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Like many cloud providers, Azure offers services that scale with usage. However, unanticipated overutilization of Service Bus, Azure Functions, and SQL databases can incur additional costs. Managing these resources effectively is crucial for keeping the billing framework predictive.

On May 1st, AWS corrected a long-standing billing bug tied to Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) data transfers between Availability Zones (AZs) and regions. That fix triggered a noticeable increase in charges for many users, especially for those with high traffic volumes or distributed architectures. The problem wasn’t new usage; it was a silent correction to an old error.

As your organization scales its Datadog footprint, you want to understand what’s driving cost changes and promote cost awareness. But to take meaningful action, you need more than a monthly bill—you need real-time, contextualized cost data tied to services and teams. Without this visibility, it’s hard to assign ownership, prevent cost overruns, or identify which changes are affecting spend.

We recently explored what the cloud is and how it has evolved over 60 years. Yet, cloud computingWe recently explored the cloud and how it has evolved over 60 years. Yet, cloud computing emerged into what it is today in 2002, when Amazon, the e-commerce giant, sought a more efficient way to expand its online marketplace. So, it is unsurprising that the company’s cloud services subsidiary (AWS), which launched in 2006, is today’s largest Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, ensuring the reliability and performance of your applications is paramount. Heroku, a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), simplifies application deployment and scaling. However, to fully leverage Heroku's capabilities, effective monitoring is essential. This guide delves into best practices for monitoring Heroku applications, providing context, practical steps, and unique insights to enhance your observability strategy.

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that scans AWS workloads for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, unintended network exposure and compliance risks, helping organizations enhance cloud security, detect threats, and meet regulatory requirements (such as ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA, NIS 2 and SOC 2 Type 2) in real time. Amazon Inspector discovers and scans Amazon EC2 instances, container images in Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry), and Lambda functions.

Managing a self-hosted cloud infrastructure can be a complex and demanding task, which is why we pay for the privilege of companies to do this for us. Thanks to the range of options we have available, we can no move our data from the cloud quickly and easily, but there is one potential boundary of this, egress fees. Egress fees are what you have to pay to move your data from out the your cloud provider to another data center.

Modern infrastructures are no longer confined to on-premises servers alone. Instead, they span cloud environments, containers, microservices, and globally distributed systems. This landscape, known as a hybrid cloud environment, has become the new norm for organizations, primarily because it offers the scalability of the cloud and ownership over specific elements afforded by an on-premises setup.

It came as a pleasant surprise. CloudZero recently discovered over $1.7 million in annualized savings. And, all from our own infrastructure. Otherwise, we would have spent $1.7 million on cloud resources we didn’t actually need. Cloud savings stories like this are common with CloudZero customers, and we often find companies spending more than they should in the cloud. If your team is also struggling with managing and controlling the cost of cloud computing, then this guide is for you!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers everything from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 giants. So, AWS interview questions are relevant for all kinds of roles, from infrastructure design to cost governance. Now, while some interviews test definitions and acronyms, the best ones dig deeper. They explore how well you understand AWS trade-offs—think of performance vs. cost, scalability vs. complexity, or security vs. usability.