Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re running workloads on Amazon EKS, there’s a good chance you already have some form of network observability in place. VPC Flow Logs have been a staple of AWS networking for years, and AWS has since introduced Container Network Observability, a newer set of capabilities built on Amazon CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor, that adds pod-level visibility and a service map directly in the EKS console.

In case you don't know the back story, in order for me to play with radios and label it "work," I've created a PostgreSQL database running on AWS Aurora. The db is fed from API calls to aprs.fi through Lambda functions on AWS. Some of the DDL & code is mine. Some is from Claude. Neither of us paid much attention to indexing when we were putting things together.

Most people end up with a photo storage service the same way they end up with a dentist: whatever was closest and easiest. Google Photos is already on Android. iCloud is already on iPhone. OneDrive comes with Microsoft 365. Amazon bundles unlimited photo storage into Prime. None of them are bad, but none of them made you read the fine print either. The fine print is access. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon all hold the encryption keys to your photos.

We hear a lot of war stories from the teams we work with. Horror stories about cloud bills, surprise overages, and the infrastructure decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. This one comes from Erik Dasque, CTO at Allure Security. It involves a junior developer, a Kubernetes CronJob, and a recurring bill that, if not caught, would have happened on a yearly basis.

Not long ago, cloud cost was an engineering problem. FinOps teams owned it, finance leaned in occasionally, and everyone else stayed out of it. Now, that’s changed. AI changed who has skin in the game. CFOs get asked about it in board meetings. CEOs field questions on earnings calls. The audience for cloud cost management has exploded — and that means the conversation CloudZero is built to enable isn’t only a technical one, it’s a business one.

JC, the Director of Software Engineering, Cloud at LogicMonitor, shares how Cost Optimization enabled his team to shift to Cost-Intelligent Observability and tackle an unexpected and growing cloud bill. As engineers, we live and breathe performance. We obsess over latency, reliability, and uptime, the hallmarks of a healthy system. But there’s another metric that’s becoming just as critical: cost.

Back in May of 2021, containers had already won. Kubernetes adoption was surging. ECS and EKS were powerful. But for many teams, deploying a simple containerized web service still meant stitching together clusters, networking rules, scaling policies, load balancers, IAM roles, and CI/CD pipelines. It felt heavier than it should. Developers no longer wanted more orchestration power. They wanted less operational drag.

To watch the full walkthrough video on the Pepperdata self-service install, click the link here. Many organizations struggle to efficiently manage their cloud costs, and that arises from difficulties in managing Kubernetes resources. Of the $419 billion spent on cloud infrastructure in 2025 (Synergy Research Group), Flexera estimates that 27% of all of cloud spend is wasted due to overprovisioned resources.