Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloud cost management is a big deal right now. For instance, 58% of organizations say their cloud costs are too high, according to our State of Cloud Cost report. Over the last five years, several other studies have shown that controlling cloud spend is a top cloud computing challenge. There’s more. As AI adoption accelerates, a new challenge has emerged: managing the rapidly growing costs of AI in a scalable and intelligent way.

Fall is here again! These headlines might not be as good as a maple-sugar doughnut and a pumpkin-spiced coffee, but they’re excellent news for FinOps practitioners nonetheless (and they won’t put you into a sugar coma).

We’ve seen the same story play out time and time again in numerous SaaS companies: The problem often begins when engineers — with a technical understanding of cloud costs and a deep understanding of how to build robust products — struggle to communicate the actual business impact of their efforts to company leaders.

Finance and engineering both thrive on efficiency. So when companies realize they’re wasting cloud spend, but aren’t sure where or how, both teams become frustrated. It’s remarkable how common this scenario has become, particularly over the past five years. Before the pandemic, Gartner reported that companies wasted over $14 billion on cloud services. During the cloud adoption surge in 2020, IDG found that 70% of US businesses overspent by as much as 62%.

Amazon Athena is heralded for its simplicity, pay-per-query pricing, and speed. Others say Athena has its fair share of limitations, which could affect your overall analytics experience and quality of analyses. So, what is what? In this post, we’ll share what AWS Athena does, compare it to Amazon Redshift, and share how to understand and control your Athena costs in AWS (with just one tool).

Introducing Kentik Traffic Costs, an industry-first automated workflow delivering instant cost estimates for network traffic slices. Learn how this exciting new feature gives network, financial, and sales teams actionable insights to optimize spend, improve margins, and drive revenue.