If you’re anything like our customers, you’re running the majority of your business on the cloud. After headcount, it’s not uncommon that your cloud bill is one of your highest business expenses. So, it’s important to make sure you are getting maximum returns on that investment. Done right, cloud computing offers major financial and operational benefits for companies.

Cloud computing optimization is a growing priority, as engineering becomes more accountable for justifying growing AWS spend. Companies that are rapidly growing can be particularly vulnerable to large fluctuations in cloud spending, which often seem to strike without rhyme or reason. Getting a handle on cloud cost is a critical first step toward cloud computing optimization, and can result in more efficient and effective systems across the board.

Cloud infrastructure refers to both hardware and software components—ranging from servers to storage to networking and virtualization software—that are required to support cloud computing. Thus, cloud infrastructure optimization refers to optimizing these components for: efficiency, performance, and cost.

Cloud spend optimization is a challenging endeavor for most companies. The major reason for this is that most don’t have sufficient visibility into their live cloud costs, so they can’t tie day-to-day decision-making to those staggering AWS bills that arrive at the end of each month (way too late to make meaningful changes).

Cloud costs can come with significant sticker shock, especially since many businesses do not have an easy way to track or predict actual cost before the bill arrives. However, there are several architectural changes that businesses can make that will help rein in cloud spend. In some cases, optimal engineering decisions should be made up-front, while in other cases certain areas should be monitored over time to identify opportunities to retool architecture and optimize cloud costs.

What if we told you that most organizations are making simple AWS cost optimization mistakes that lead to surprising monthly cloud bills and unnecessary overspend? As an engineer, you’d probably be relieved to know that many of your organization’s AWS spending spikes are within your team’s control, given access to the right data.

Site reliability engineers (SREs) are the glue between “Dev” and “Ops,” ensuring that software engineering expertise is applied to operations challenges. SREs naturally focus on making systems more reliable, efficient, and scalable. If you’re an SRE yourself, you’re already deeply familiar with these ideas.

If you’re a CFO or finance leader at a company that uses public cloud services like AWS, chances are you’ve had a bill cross your desk that may seem confusing. You or your team of financial analysts may have frequent conversations with engineering about how AWS services are allocated across different engineering initiatives.

If you're running in the cloud and ever struggle to predict, report on, or attribute your cloud costs, you may want to consider a new kind of role: A Financial Cloud Operations Manager. While a traditional cloud operations manager may sit on the DevOps team or report to an engineering lead, a financial cloud ops manager’s reporting structure is slightly different.

These days, a major part of most IT budgets is the cloud bill. But unlike server-bound infrastructure budgeting, cloud bills can be unpredictable and highly variable from month to month. However, if organizations embrace cloud cost optimization to regulate cloud bills and avoid surprises, they’ll find themselves with considerable found money that can be reinvested into other areas.