In the early days of SaaS companies, most engineering and cloud operations teams weren’t tasked with monitoring or optimizing cloud costs. In fact, it would have been unlikely for these teams to care about cloud cost optimization at all, let alone take measures to fix issues and look for opportunities. Today, SaaS companies that want to secure a competitive foothold and ensure long-term success have to care about cloud costs.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service provides a variety of virtual machines (instances) for compute workloads. Among those, Amazon EC2 M5 instances are among the most versatile. In addition, there are different types of M5 instances available. Each of these has its own best use case. In this guide, we share an in-depth look at M5 instance types, sizes, and when to use them.

Many companies are rapidly adopting cloud-native computing services, like containers, microservices, and serverless computing. Unlike monolithic applications, these technologies rely on distributed architectures. Whether you are running them in the cloud, on-premises, or both, distributed systems consist of thousands or millions of processes and components. The challenge now is to make these complex systems' inner workings visible, controllable, and improvable.

For IT and EUC teams, reducing costs is easier said than done. You can’t just blindly reduce headcount, delay transformation projects, or extend hardware lifecycles in the hopes of appeasing your CFO’s demands for short-term cost reduction. The reality is, rushed cost-cutting will put your service desk under pressure. In turn, such self-inflicted inefficiencies will only result in performance degradations, additional tickets, and escalations.

With organizations across industries facing inflationary pressures and the threat of recession, CFOs are forced to impose cost-cutting measures to improve cost efficiency across teams to tide through these tough times. This has resulted in IT teams being faced with a dilemma. How to improve the cost-effectiveness of the team without impacting employee satisfaction and service desk productivity?

“Perfect tagging” is a little bit like perfectly tuning a piano. It takes an enormous amount of manual effort to get right, it’s never truly perfect, and the slightest change in the surrounding environment can throw it out of harmony. The closer an organization wants to get to perfect tagging, the more engineering resources they have to invest in it — frequently at the expense of more impactful, innovation- and product-oriented projects.

FP&A tools can help your business assess, plan, and budget business activities more effectively. The tools help by automating a lot of the work involved, helping you tell where you could be losing money, and revealing additional revenue streams you can capitalize on. At a time when SaaS competition is at an all-time high, you need all the advantages at your disposal to deliver the most value at the least cost.

Yet, the same flexibility that makes EC2 so appealing can also make it complex, confusing, and unnecessarily costly. A good way to understand the compute service is to familiarize yourself with EC2 instance types, and what the best use cases are for each. This guide will cover that and more.

While cloud solutions can give you greater flexibility as you scale your infrastructure, limited visibility into resource utilization makes provisioning the right amount of compute resources challenging. To ensure that every workload is fully supported, many organizations may opt to over-provision, which leads to overspending. Or, in an attempt to maximize cost savings, organizations may under-provision, leaving workloads unsupported and risking serious performance impacts.