If you have trouble understanding Microsoft Azure Storage pricing, you’re not alone. Azure Storage options can feel like a multi-layered maze of storage account types, tiers, pricing pages, specs — and then some. Yet, understanding your cloud cost drivers begins with looking at where your money goes. Only then can you tell if you are getting value for your money.

Today we’re announcing our new Spend Allocation feature and updates to Spike Protection, giving you more control over how your projects consume events. While we’ve made it super easy for teams to add Sentry to their projects, we kept hearing from the community that they wanted more guardrails to ensure their noisy projects don’t eat through their event quota.

As we were planning “Cloud Atlas,” our primary goal was to talk with someone who was “in the room” during the genesis of the cloud. Allan Vermeulen, who worked for Amazon from 1999-2021, and who proposed Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), became that source. Allan is a born engineer. He has always enjoyed building things — whether “out of bits and software or boards and lumber,” Allan takes pleasure in creating useful things.

A major problem led Amazon to introduce Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Reports. Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) users were overspending on services they couldn't quite identify. Before the two cloud financial management tools, the AWS public cloud was like a buffet menu without prices. Engineers could use as many cloud resources as they could get away with (and then some), only to be hit with surprise bills at the end of the month or billing cycle.

YouTube. Netflix. Uber. Spotify. TikTok. You name it. You sign up and get your own account. Once you set it up however you want, you can access it from any internet-enabled device, including smartphones and smartwatches. In case your device breaks, is lost, or you switch to a new one, you can still access the account, as well as the settings and information it contained, from another device without having to recreate everything from scratch.

IT spend on big data systems in 2023 is forecasted to be $222 billion (Statista.com: Information spending on data center systems worldwide from 2012 to 2023). Actual monetary cost is just one parameter: infrastructure resources, personnel, and the overall time taken to retrieve big data insights push spending even further.

It’s almost impossible to create an optimized cloud system out of the gate and keep it running at a perfect balance over the long term. There’s almost always something that could benefit from some tweaks and adjustments. Cloud costs have a way of creeping up slowly while you’re not paying attention. And if you’re not careful, they can spiral out of control before you realize anything is happening.

CloudSpend-Cloud cost management FinOps professionals often find it difficult to gain full visibility of cost overruns resulting from cloud wastage. MangageEngine CloudSpend is a cloud cost management tool that helps you reduce cloud wastage and save costs. If you are a sysadmin or a FinOps professional and are wondering what CloudSpend does that native cloud billing tools don’t, this article is for you.

We’re proud to announce that CloudCheckr, part of the Spot by NetApp portfolio for CloudOps, has achieved the AWS Cloud Operations Competency in the categories of Cloud Financial Management and Compliance and Auditing. With this achievement, the Spot by NetApp portfolio solidifies its position as the industry’s broadest and deepest cloud operations portfolio for customers from enterprises to startups to managed service providers.

Just about everything you interact with digitally is enabled by the cloud. Whether you’re doom-scrolling on Instagram, binge-watching on Netflix, ride-hailing on Uber, or downloading super-cool cloud podcasts (hint, hint) on Spotify, you’re using the cloud. But most people don’t have any idea what the cloud is, where it came from, or what we, as a species, spend on it.