Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Millions of organizations across industries use data to improve their strategies, products, and services. Yet, there are bucketloads of cloud data platforms on the market, and picking the right one for your needs can be challenging. This in-depth comparison guide will help you decide on the data clouds offered by Snowflake vs. AWS vs. Azure.

Spring is unfolding, and your event calendar is about to be overflowing with new FinOps get-togethers. Plus, we’ve got some cloud cost announcements from a couple of the major providers that could affect your bill and your FinOps strategy. Here’s the top news from March 2025 and upcoming events you won’t want to miss.

At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice that brings together finance, technology, and business teams to manage and optimize cloud spending. For SaaS companies, where cloud infrastructure is integral to operations, FinOps practices directly impact the bottom line. But as with any emerging discipline, the big question is: Is a FinOps certification truly worth the time and financial investment?

AWS is one of the most popular public cloud platforms, offering over 240 cloud services. Despite the cloud provider’s efforts to make its tools easy to use, managing the vast array of AWS resources and services can be challenging. For example, AWS environments require continuous monitoring to determine what changes need to be made to reduce costs, improve performance, and secure your systems. This is where AWS monitoring tools, services, and best practices can help.

When your cloud environment spans multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) and SaaS providers, it can be challenging to collect cost and usage data in a way that gives you complete visibility. Each provider formats its data according to a unique billing model, and these inconsistencies can leave you with fragmented information about your total cloud spend.

At CloudZero, we drink deeply of our own champagne. We consider ourselves customer zero, and use our product to its maximum potential, to reduce wasteful spending and improve our unit economics. We even use our software to drive meaningful board discussions (with help from a slide template you can download here).

For data professionals interested in data modeling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, Databricks offers a robust cloud data platform. The Databricks Lakehouse combines data lake and data warehouse capabilities in one architecture. This makes Databricks particularly suitable for building sophisticated data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) models. Plus, Databricks claims its lakehouse is up to 12X cheaper than traditional alternatives.

You can assess your company’s financial health using a number of SaaS metrics, depending on the type of business you are in. Among the most useful is the SaaS Magic Number. So, why is it called the SaaS Magic Number, and how do you calculate it? And why is it so important to track your SaaS Magic Number regularly?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) launched in April 2008 with Google App Engine. This developer-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering allowed developers to build and host web applications on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Initially, App Engine only supported Python, but in 2009, Google added Java support, offering more programming flexibility. In 2010, GCP expanded further with Cloud Storage, its second major cloud product.