Do you know how much it costs to operate your software per customer, at each pricing tier? The past six months have been highly unusual to say the least. For some companies, the disruption and shift to work from home meant 100x in usage almost overnight; for others usage completely collapsed in the same time period. These sharp swings in utilization have been disruptive to cloud unit economics. Both scenarios are risky and require extreme elasticity from the technical infrastructure.

If you’re a SaaS business — especially B2B — you know that your profitability can vary significantly from customer to customer. We all have a sense of our “expensive customers,” who use the product heavily and push things to the limit. That also means there are more profitable customers. Who are they? And how do they use the product?

At CloudZero, we talk to leadership teams at SaaS and companies every day. When it comes to individual customer profitability, the vast majority of them fall into two camps: they’re either taking their best guess — or they have no idea. Typically only the largest companies - those with the resources to dedicate a 5-10 person engineering team to calculating cost - have this level of insight. And you can be sure they yield that knowledge to their competitive advantage!

Every decision that an engineer makes in the cloud impacts cost. Yet we know that engineers aren’t cost experts, and many worry that asking them to care about cloud cost will slow them down and distract them from delivering customer value. Top cloud-native companies dedicate entire teams of engineers to build custom tools to measure unit cost and deliver cloud cost to engineering teams. But I’m guessing you don’t have eight engineers you can spare to build internal cost tools?

If you are looking to account for your container costs and understand how your AWS Kubernetes or EKS cluster spend maps onto your workloads, this guide was made for you! In this post we will walk through the steps to get up and running with CloudZero and Amazon Container Insights fast. CloudZero has integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for its strength as a secure and automated solution for sharing container metrics within AWS.

If cost optimization is your only reason for adopting Kubernetes and containers, you might be in for a rude surprise — many companies find that costs increase after moving to Kubernetes. Even companies who adopt Kubernetes for other reasons, like time-to-market advantages, should follow basic cost control best practices to stay within the budget.

Here at CloudZero, we’ve made some updates to our dashboard that we’re excited to share with you! I actually prefer this original definition. When you hear the word dashboard, if you’re not thinking about software, you’re probably picturing the place in a car where you have various dials and readouts for safe operation of the vehicle. But did you know what the term dashboard predates cars?

When organizations think about the relationship between Kubernetes and cloud costs, they often focus on Kubernetes’ auto-scaling capabilities and what this means for optimizing compute resources. Kubernetes does allow organizations to provision compute resources more thinly, because the platform allows them to scale up automatically if there’s a demand spike in the middle of the night.

One of the mistakes organizations make related to Kubernetes costs is addressing them primarily after-the-fact, once the application is running successfully. There are certainly changes that can be made to improve efficiency once the application is running, but cost-control measures are best considered at the beginning, not middle or end, of the application lifecycle.

In surveys about why organizations adopt Kubernetes, a desire to reduce overall IT costs is an oft-cited reason for adopting containers and Kubernetes. Yet after the fact, when organizations talk about surprises during Kubernetes adoption, many cite increased costs. So does Kubernetes reduce costs or not? Like so many things in life, it depends. Here are some of the reasons Kubernetes projects come in over-budget and how to avoid them.