Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When CloudZero’s CTO Erik Peterson joined the FinOps Weekly podcast in October 2025, he didn’t hold back. Instead of going on about the usual best practices of AI cost optimization, he posed challenges to how we approach AI spending. From “zombie AI experiments” eating your budget to why you should stop apologizing for using AI, these 10 insights from the podcast are worth considering in how we approach AI FinOps. (Watch the full podcast below and keep reading for more!)

A key advantage of Kubernetes for container management is its high scalability. Kubernetes nodes are directly involved in this, and they can significantly impact your efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and service availability. This guide provides an in-depth look at Kubernetes nodes, including types of nodes and operational best practices.

When it comes to storing your files or photos online, the number of choices can be overwhelming. To make things more confusing, some services focus on cloud storage and photos, and others offer both, such as Google Photos and Google Drive. But what’s the difference? Although both appear to be the same, they have some differences based on whether you need photo or file storage. Both have advantages and features to meet your needs as a photographer or for general cloud storage.

Downtime is brutally expensive and damaging. Enterprises can lose about $9,000 every minute systems are down, while smaller businesses lose hundreds of dollars per minute. A single outage can often cost over $100,000, and nearly a third of companies lose customers due to downtime. That’s why many organizations turn to platforms like SolarWinds to maintain reliable systems and minimize the risk of costly disruptions.

I recently wrote about the impending SaaS crisis, driven by companies’ newfound ability to use AI to build software they used to have to buy. I predicted this phenomenon would make it even harder for SaaS vendors to drive growth, and that elite SaaS margins would fall from the mid-70s to the mid-60s as companies leaned more into their data and AI.

Wondering what's the big deal with Black Friday? And why does every business on earth seem to be obsessed with the quasi-holiday? Or are you just looking for great deals? Black Friday has become a sort of global cultural institution. Everyone knows about it, some look forward to it, and a few go crazy for the big day. It may be hard to believe, but Black Friday hasn't always been a thing, and it's actually a relatively recent development.

In July 2024, CrowdStrike — one of the world’s top cybersecurity companies — shipped a minor configuration update to its Windows security product. Within minutes, airlines, banks, hospitals, and retailers worldwide began crashing. The update wasn’t new code. It was a routine content file that slipped through with a bug in its safety checks. When Windows machines loaded it, the agent hit an out-of-bounds memory error and crashed. Devices blue-screened and got stuck in reboot loops.

Organisations are no longer limited to running everything in-house. The real question is where different workloads should sit to deliver the best long-term results. For many, that means weighing up cloud vs colocation. Both offer advantages over traditional infrastructure but serve different aims. Cloud makes it simple to scale and launch new services, while colocation provides predictable costs, direct control, and stronger assurance for compliance.