Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In Part I of this two-part series, I talked about the key benefits of top-down cost allocation: It starts at the provider level, incorporates every penny of your cloud spend, and lets you break it down at as granular a level as is useful for your business.

High-quality cloud cost allocation has become an existential issue for businesses. In order to get as much out of their (mounting) cloud investments as possible, business leaders need to know how much they’re spending in the cloud, what/who they’re spending it on, and whether there’s a good reason for it. In its ideal form, cost allocation answers all these questions.

Just as there are a handful of stages to describe the financial journey from startup to established company — pre-seed and seed funding, followed by series A, B, and C funding — there are also stages to the process of achieving a healthy understanding of your costs.

Kubernetes (K8s) packs a ton of benefits as a container orchestration platform. For instance, K8s is big on automation. This includes automating workload discovery, self-healing, and scaling containerized applications. Yet, Kubernetes isn't always production-ready after a few tweaks. This guide shares crucial Kubernetes best practices you'll want to start using immediately to improve your K8s security, performance, and costs. Let’s get to it!

Setting FinOps KPIs helps keep your whole organization aligned toward the same financial goals. However, it takes more than simply setting a broad, company-wide financial goal and turning every employee loose to work on that goal without more specific directions. It’s far better to come up with realistic and achievable goals tailored toward each person or team that will be responsible for them. That’s because KPIs should ideally be focused around the typical persona of each team.

Typically, startup founders and executives must meet with their board of directors each quarter to review the progress of the company. They may talk about broad topics such as total costs and total revenue, and use these numbers as a guide to determine which moves the company should make in the near future. Often missing from the conversation, however, is a clear and detailed discussion of SaaS metrics.

It can be a challenge to measure costs within a SaaS company. While a business with physical inventory can count the number of items sitting on the shelf and the money needed to create, store, and ship those items, operating within the cloud means SaaS companies have to measure their costs through a layer of abstraction. The number of users a given product supports and the resources needed to keep that product up and running could change by the minute.

At CloudZero, the thing we do better than any other cost solution is connect the dots between cloud cost and your businesses. While other solutions offer reporting and dashboards that answer, “How much did we spend?”, CloudZero also enables you to answer “Why?”. Was it because you onboarded a new customer? Did your team push new code? Or did usage of a feature tick up after some clever UX adjustments?

Identifying great business optimization opportunities is tougher than it seems. You often need to weigh the projected revenue and costs of taking a new path against the potential opportunity costs of not taking that path. Not only is this an apples-to-oranges comparison, but also a “what if” scenario riddled with variables. For instance, what if slashing costs makes the customer experience so much slower and more frustrating that sales decline and you wind up losing revenue?

Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the two most popular cloud providers today. They both offer a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, you'll find products covering multiple computing areas, such as compute, storage, analytics, and networking. You can also deploy AWS or Azure services in the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid setup.