Cloud infrastructure and the applications it hosts generate millions of rows of raw data in short periods. Viewed in the context of everyday business activities, most of the data makes little sense. So many companies amass mountains of this type of data in data lakes and data warehouses, hoping to figure out how to use it later but end up never tapping into it.

It's been a rollercoaster ride at Twitter recently. News of layoffs with "50% higher than legally required" severance pay has dominated the news. But Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk is also trying to optimize cloud infrastructure costs. Some of the tactics used include refusing to pay a $70 million AWS bill and $8 million to a software services company. More on that below.

Merging two companies into one comes with several challenges. One of the most formidable endeavors is maintaining control over cloud costs while a cloud-to-cloud integration — essentially, taking the cloud environments of two companies and combining them into one — is taking place. One or both companies may not be tracking cost data, and even if they are, it’s highly unlikely that their cost-tracking strategies line up well enough to merge seamlessly.

Cloud financial management has become an increasingly sophisticated business function over the past few years, far beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. As a result, many companies are unable to monitor and allocate cloud costs accurately. In 2022, Gartner estimates companies will waste as much as 30% of their cloud budgets due to this problem. A more holistic approach to cloud cost management is necessary to reduce waste and optimize cloud spending.

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered cloud computing as we know it today. And with about 34% of the market share, Amazon Web Services remains the largest cloud infrastructure provider today, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). AWS is a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). That means AWS builds, maintains, and continually improves multiple data centers worldwide and then rents the computing infrastructure out to other companies as needed, over the Internet.

In software engineering, measuring your performance gives you the knowledge you need to make informed decisions regarding your products, features, processes, and even your dev teams. Measuring also tells you if you’re on track to meet your engineering goals. Yet, with an abundance of tasks, data, and other information to keep track of, how do you decide on the right metrics to monitor?

Over the past few years, Kubernetes (K8s) has become the preferred method of orchestrating containers and microservices. Its self-healing, high scalability, and open-source nature make it appealing to a wide range of users. However, deploying, running, and scaling containerized applications and microservices with Kubernetes can be quite challenging. The Kubernetes community keeps growing, but there still aren’t that many experienced K8s engineers.

Managing cloud computing costs is a big deal right now. For instance, 60% of organizations say their cloud costs are higher (over 70%) than they should be, according to our State of Cloud Cost Intelligence report. Over the last five years, several other studies have shown that controlling cloud spend is a top cloud computing challenge. Yet almost all organizations acknowledge that moving more workloads to the cloud is a top cloud initiative in the next year.

We built CloudZero for a simple reason: Bring business fundamentals to cloud-driven organizations without stifling innovation. It sounds simple, but for years, the intrinsic complexities of the cloud and extrinsic pressures to grab SaaS market share made it near-impossible for businesses to achieve this. Until CloudZero.

All the major cloud providers allow users to attach business context to their infrastructure in some way. It’s this context that allows users to divide up their cloud bill into more easily digestible bites and keep track of cost trends for different resource types. Thorough cloud cost allocation gives companies the ability to make educated business decisions.