As cloud environments grow and evolve more rapidly than ever, and with new cloud services emerging every day, achieving and maintaining a high level of organization across hundreds of resources and global teams can seem like a daunting task. However, it’s not impossible, and can be done through tagging. This post will cover the fundamentals of tags, as well as a comprehensive roadmap to developing a tagging strategy.
Innovation drives success. And today more than ever, software drives innovation. No matter what product or service you offer, you’re a software company. You may not sell something called “software,” but successfully building, marketing, delivering, and supporting customers for any product today relies on software and technology. Innovation is what software developers do. And software developers are at the center of what CloudZero does.
Today, you probably wouldn’t blink at the idea of involving security in your development process. In fact, “shifting security left” has become so commonplace in the security industry, that there are conferences and job titles dedicated to SecOps (or DevSecOps or SecDevOps *eye roll emoji*). Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that the massive transition to this mindset took place.
Andreessen Horowitz recently published a blog about the Heavy Cloud Costs and Scaling Challenges of The New Business of AI, in which they describe how AI companies are facing cloud cost challenges, which are impacting their margins. As someone who used to manage a fully home-grown on-site distributed speech recognition platform for an industry leader, I know firsthand that ML can be expensive and challenging to maintain. However, it doesn’t have to be.
Whether it be a tweets about shocking AWS bills or the impact of cloud bills on tech company margins, cloud costs are a hot topic. If you're looking to get up to speed and learn a little more, check out this collection of podcasts, blogs, and articles.
I never used to care about the cost of the systems I built. As an engineer, why would I? Especially in the days before the cloud, infrastructure resources were purchased and procured by somebody who worked many levels above me. Even when I first started building on the cloud, I had to submit requests (again, to somebody many levels above me) for my resources.
Making sure you don't overspend on AWS is a perennial challenge for many software companies. To help make sure you don't surpass your budget, AWS offers billing alerts, which send you an alert when your costs have reached a certain threshold. This can be a handy way to keep your costs in check, but can take some time to set up and will cost you some extra money.
It is no secret that it is not that hard to accidentally spend a boatload of money on AWS. This Twitter user told the story of his $77,000 mistake with a monkey emoji (because what’s funnier than spending the price of an entry level Tesla by accident.) The scary part is that many of us have been there. If you are not looking at your cloud bill every day, it is easy to let the costs run up quickly, then suffer from bill shock when it arrives a month later.
We’re often asked what are some of the top areas where we see customers overspending? Data transfer costs from misconfigured NAT Gateway definitely tops our list as one of the most common. In this article we’ll walk you through five steps to find which data transfers you’re overspending on and how to you can eliminate those excess charges.
Amazon recently announced the rollout of their new AWS Savings Plans, a new way to reduce your cloud compute costs. These allow you to achieve the discounts associated with their popular Reserved Instances (up to 72% off on-demand pricing) without having to engage in the headache of managing the same. With the new plans, you would commit to a particular hourly spend of your choosing on either a 1 year or 3 year fixed term.
