Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As organizations are adopting more of the FinOps foundation practices and trying to optimize their cloud-computing costs, engineering plays an imperative role in that maturity. Traditional troubleshooting of applications nowadays relies heavily on static logs and legacy telemetry that developers added either when first writing their applications, or whenever they run a troubleshooting session where they lack telemetry and need to add more logs in an ad-hoc fashion.

Effective troubleshooting and resolution of critical production issues require DevOps and R&D teams to utilize logging and observability. However, selecting the right logging solution can be challenging, given the wide range of available options and associated costs. Additionally, the strategy for logging usage should be tailored to the needs of different personas and use cases, such as DevOps engineers versus developers.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is steadily gaining steam. Launched in 2008 — just two years after AWS — GCP has taken the bronze medal in public cloud services for years. While it still occupies third place, its market share has steadily expanded: In Q4 2021, GCP owned 9% of the public cloud market, and by Q3 2022, it had jumped to 11%.

Alphabet. Netflix. Shopify. Amazon. Meta. Microsoft. These are just a few of the leading tech companies that recently laid off thousands of employees. Slashing jobs, because it is often one of the biggest expenses for tech companies, may seem like a quick fix, but it can be counterproductive, especially when it impacts experienced engineers. So, what are the specific reasons tech companies are cutting jobs? And what are the alternatives to layoffs?

It all started with a simple Slack message. If you need a refresher, gross margin is a business metric that calculates what percentage of revenue you take home as profit. To calculate it, you subtract your costs (often abbreviated as COGS, short for costs of goods sold) from your revenue and divide it by your total revenue, et voilà, gross margin. So, if your annual revenue is $10M and your COGS are $3M, your gross margin is 70%. Gross margin plays an integral role in SaaS company valuations.

When a company moves from an on-premises data center to the cloud, they expect changes to affect engineering decisions and functionality. After all, their whole way of building and supporting new products has changed. What many companies don’t expect is that the switch to working with cloud providers also necessitates new budgeting and accounting practices.

With containerization, you can write an application once and run it anywhere. Along with portability, containers are also much more resource-efficient than traditional virtual machines (VMs). However, managing containers at scale can be challenging. Besides, many teams find container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes overkill and too complex.

CloudSpend: Cloud cost management With the rising popularity of a hybrid cloud strategy, businesses need to keep their spending in check. To provide high availability for its data, more organizations have started to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, and they have choices for cloud platforms. AWS and Azure accounted for the lion’s share of the market in 2022. With their expertise in providing IaaS, this has also often resulted in disparate deployments with respect to cost estimation and control.