Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Managing and knowing where your cloud spend goes is nearly impossible without the right cloud cost management tools. Cloud-native, distributed technologies like microservices, containers, and Kubernetes can make it even more difficult to have full visibility into resource usage — and the associated costs. This cost information is also often buried in rows and columns of text on cloud providers’ bills. In addition, a lot of cloud cost management tools are clunky and inexact.

A reliable notifications system can send highly scalable, multi-protocol messages — via email, SMS, or apps — all from one platform. For example, you can send timely cost anomaly alerts directly to your developers on Slack to alert them to potential overspending before it becomes a board meeting emergency. So, what does this have to do with Amazon SNS pricing? Let’s start at the beginning to better understand what you’re paying for when you get that AWS SNS bill.

The weather may be frightful in most parts of the U.S. right now, but these cloud cost updates are pretty delightful (if we do say so ourselves). Here’s the top cloud news that dropped in January 2025: Enjoy!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 fully-featured services. AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Lambda, and the AWS Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are some of the most critical services you should become familiar with. We’ve previously covered Amazon ECS vs. EKS vs. Fargate for managing and deploying containers. This guide will explain how Amazon EC2, Lambda, ECS, and S3 compare and when you’ll want to use each.

Datadog and New Relic didn’t become some of the best observability platforms today by accident. Unlike traditional monitoring tools, both are built from the ground up to be cloud-native. This design is crucial for tracking system health across hybrid cloud infrastructure, modern applications, and microservices/containerized architectures. Both platforms also offer more flexible pricing models than the traditional subscription-based pricing you’ll see elsewhere.

Amazon Aurora offers up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL and three times that of PostgreSQL. Its architecture combines the database engine with a cloud-native, SSD-based storage system built for high I/O operations to achieve this. That said, AWS Aurora pricing can be a real headscratcher for customers, with concerns about the cost structure, pricing components, and ways to cut expenses.

In the last few weeks, industry headlines once again brought the need for businesses to have complete cost visibility and proactive cost management strategies to the forefront of the constantly accelerating cloud and AI landscape. That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest product releases, designed to supercharge your cloud cost intelligence with deeper integrations into industry leaders like AWS and OpenAI.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Savings Plans to offer customers a more flexible and discounted pricing model than Reserved Instances. Like Reserved Instances, AWS Savings Plans offer discounts for longer-term commitments. You can learn more about the differences between Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans here. In this post, we’ll quickly explain AWS Savings Plans, how they work, and what they can and cannot do for you.

Containers are a big deal today. They are software units that contain all the code, runtime, and dependencies required to run a distributed application. Thus, containers help engineers test and run apps without compatibility issues on any device and platform. Organizations can use containers to reduce engineering costs, speed up deployments, develop and test AI models, and automate more processes. You probably want those benefits as well.

Many companies migrate to the cloud and overlook costs in favor of innovation, speed, and flexibility. They assume that the cloud is inherently more cost-effective than on-premises infrastructure. However, the organizations soon realize that the same characteristics that make the cloud such an enticing and flexible resource can also lead to unexpectedly higher usage bills than expected. The challenge is to find the right balance between optimal system performance, engineering velocity, and cost.