Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Non-prod environments don’t require the same levels of performance, availability or uptime that production environments do. Yet many are run like production environments, at a great cost. This problem will only grow as more legacy apps migrate to the cloud. So today, we’re looking at 6 tactics to drive down non-production costs (and carbon) for AWS users.

Snowflake has gained significant traction in the data warehousing space due to its unique architecture, flexibility, and ease of use. Heck, after using a legacy approach for some time, we at CloudZero went with Snowflake. While at it, we noticed Snowflake customers express concerns about costs more often than they would like. So, in this guide, we’ll share our best tips for getting the most out of Snowflake without overspending.

In this blog series we’ve examined Five Myths of Apache Spark Optimization. But one final, bonus myth remains unaddressed: Bonus Myth: I’ve done everything I can. The rest of the application waste is just the cost of running Apache Spark. Unfortunately, many companies running cloud environments have come to think of application waste as a cost of doing business, as inevitable as rent and taxes.

If cost optimization is your only reason for adopting Kubernetes and containers, you might be in for a rude surprise — many companies find that costs increase after moving to Kubernetes. Even companies who adopt Kubernetes for other reasons, like time-to-market advantages, should follow basic cost control best practices to stay within the budget. Optimizing cloud costs related to running Kubernetes doesn’t have to involve trade-offs for performance or availability.

According to Gartner, 90% of global organizations will run containerized applications in production by 2027. The need for continuous innovation, performance, and availability is driving this shift to meet customer expectations. Kubernetes plays a crucial role in this transformation. It offers a robust open-source platform for managing containerized applications. Yet, ensuring optimal application performance is only possible with observability.

It’s all well and good to say that “every engineering decision is a buying decision.” It’s one of our favorite phrases here at CloudZero! However, it’s one thing to say it and quite another to LIVE IT. That’s pretty much the driving force behind CloudZero: We want your team to be able to access your company’s cloud spend data, analyze it from every angle that might be helpful, and use that information to grow the business.

Here is the thing. You don’t need more than one cloud service provider unless you are considering a multi-cloud strategy. And even if you plan to work with all three cloud vendors, you’ll want to know which one is right for specific services. To help you decide, we’ll share the strengths, pricing, and other differences between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) below. Let’s start from the very beginning.

Businesses move to the cloud for several reasons. For some, moving to the cloud means gaining access to the best enterprise-level technology without the associated costs of handling, maintaining, and managing the underlying infrastructure. For others (like startups), the ability to scale quickly and respond faster to market demands is at the top of the list.

Pricing matters. Charge too little and you won’t earn enough revenue to stay afloat. Charge too much and you could lose thousands in potential business. You don’t want to price out some customers. So what can you do? This is where tiered pricing comes into play. The SaaS pricing approach can be helpful for companies looking to meet the needs and budgets of their different customer personas.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) service should provide high-performance block storage for Amazon EC2 instances. Yet, without careful management, Amazon EBS can become inefficient, leading to performance bottlenecks and cost overruns. For example, EBS volumes persist even after an EC2 instance has been terminated. The unused EBS volumes continue to incur costs.