Now more than ever our customers are asking us for ways to reduce their public cloud spend. Customers are also asking us whether spot instances are still providing the high level of discount that they always have. The reality is that spot instance pricing is still very much based on supply and demand. Excess capacity from the cloud provider means availability can change within minutes. Therefore, you might see pricing for a particular market increase for a few months and then dip shortly thereafter.

Migrating your on-prem applications to Azure can help you improve scalability, reliability, and security. It can also help reduce costs and free your engineering teams to focus on innovation and performance optimization. But it can be hard to understand Azure costs as they evolve during your migration and to see how they correlate with your resource utilization once you’re up and running in Azure.

The cloud holds such promise. It’s the promise of near-infinite scalability, power, and growth potential. Companies switching to the cloud, especially in the early days of the 2010s, were seduced by the possibilities of what could happen if they just spent a little more, raced against their competitors a little faster, or achieved just a bit more product functionality. Could they be the next Twitter? The next Uber? Or something even bigger and better than what had come before?

No matter how complicated your monthly cloud bill, all spend in the cloud is premised on a very simple formula.

At CloudZero, we believe that you should be able to see where your cloud spend goes. By doing this, you can pinpoint who, why, and what is driving your cloud costs. With this insight, you can more easily make informed decisions, such as reduce unnecessary spend or increase investment where you can earn more. In that regard, we recently covered Azure Storage pricing and Amazon S3 pricing. As a continuation of our pricing series, here's a bookmarkable guide to Google Cloud Storage pricing.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud storage platform that provides highly scalable, low-latency, and relatively affordable cloud storage. Plus, developers can use S3 to save, archive, and retrieve data anywhere on the web at any time with a user-friendly web interface. Amazon S3 is a simple key-based object store you can use to store any type of data, structured or unstructured.

It’s a fact of life within the SaaS world that some features will perform better or worse than others in terms of costs versus revenue. If it were possible to develop every single new release in a way that it would flawlessly maintain desired profit margins, everyone would be doing it. What separates the major players from companies that struggle year after year is how they monitor and respond to changing circumstances as they arise, and whether they learn from past mistakes.