Conventional wisdom states that SaaS engineers don’t care about costs. They care about building an optimal product, regardless of the dollar signs associated with it. As a result, the finance team feels they must corral the engineers’ efforts and constrain them to work within an agreed budget. In fact, the FinOps Foundation’s annual survey consistently ranks “getting engineers to take action on cost optimization” as the number one challenge experienced by FinOps specialists.

Earlier, before the advent of cloud computing, businesses used to have their data centers. These data centers were expensive to set up and maintain. They required a lot of expertise to manage. As a result, only large enterprises could afford them. However, with cloud computing, even small and medium businesses can now take advantage of this emerging and forward-thinking technology. Data shows that businesses that use cloud technologies tend to grow faster, be more profitable, and generate more jobs.

As a cloud product manager, much of our jobs center around creating KPIs (or OKRs, if you prefer) such as sales revenue, freemium conversions, or customer stickiness, and encouraging development teams to hit product performance goals. But what happens after those goals have been met? Do we create new KPIs and push forward, or do we take a step back and evaluate whether each indicator actually translates to higher profit for the business?

A good chunk of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud spending goes to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. Because it is the default compute service on AWS, Amazon EC2 is key to building, running, and scaling your AWS-based applications. That also means Amazon EC2 pricing has a tremendous impact on your AWS budget. Understanding how the EC2 billing model works will help you control and optimize your AWS spending.

Amid the first bear market in over a decade, the world’s largest companies are facing intense pressure to cut back. Layoffs have made headlines, but cutting workforce is not a silver-bullet solution to surviving in a down market. True, companies tend to spend the most on personnel, but using layoffs as a first line of recession defense has myriad negative consequences for survivors, including reduced job satisfaction, reduced organizational commitment, and declining job performance.

In Part I of this two-part series, I talked about the key benefits of top-down cost allocation: It starts at the provider level, incorporates every penny of your cloud spend, and lets you break it down at as granular a level as is useful for your business.

Cloud costs can pile up quickly, and often behind the scenes. We explain how software-defined cloud interconnect (SDCI) can help your business rein in a swelling budget.