Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Organizations receive high monthly bills from cloud providers with no way of determining why the number changes from month to month or how to accurately predict future spend. More importantly, there is little information to provide visibility if cloud resources are being deployed efficiently or if spend is correlated to business performance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides three types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances; On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances (RIs), and Spot Instances. EC2 On-Demand instances are the default and most expensive instances. RIs and Spot instances offer discounts of up to 72% and 90% on On-Demand instances, respectively. The Reserved Instances are long-term commitments that guarantee you compute power for a year or three. Spot instances fluctuate in price and availability constantly.

In the past couple of months, after nearly a decade of huge returns and steady growth, the tech industry has officially slowed down. Companies are tightening their belts — laying off employees, freezing spending, and lowering budgets. If you work in tech right now, it’s likely you’ve felt it.

DevOps helps developers and operators work together to create high-quality software quickly. DevOps is a modern software development philosophy that uses various tools, processes, and people to get ideal results rapidly. As a result, companies that use DevOps satisfy customer needs, achieving a competitive advantage.

Whether you’re a product manager, a marketing organization, or in finance, you’re probably using the cloud in some way. But many businesses are still immature when it comes to building systems in the cloud, especially when it comes to how they use their financial resources. Here, CloudZero founder and CTO Erik Peterson breaks down the responsibility of using the cloud, how to break down the costs of cloud computing, and what you need to do to change the conversation from cost to profit.

One of the best ways to achieve efficient product development is to make sure everyone involved with a project is on the same page, working toward the same ultimate goals. However, this is harder to do than it sounds. Engineering and product teams bring very different priorities to the table, and establishing which priorities to focus on first often becomes a matter of debate.

Companies of all sizes can take advantage of AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) to save money on the price of standard Amazon EC2 On-Demand instances. To receive the discounted rate associated with AWS Reserved Instances, you must commit to a year or three years of usage. In exchange, you can save up to 75% off the On-Demand price.

When each quarter’s financial report lands on the desks of a company’s C-Suite executives, those execs are essentially looking at a black box of spending and revenue. They can see the total numbers and the growth or shrinkage of certain categories, but they ultimately have very little context into why each number is as high or low as it is. Without this context, it’s all too easy to feel sticker shock over a seemingly outrageous cloud bill and demand that costs be cut at once.

AWS Cost Explorer is one of the core pillars of AWS cloud financial management. It helps collect resource consumption data and associated cost information across multiple AWS services. Cost Explorer then helps visualize all of this data in one dashboard to ease cost management. You can then analyze, understand, and share cloud cost data with various parties. Cost Explorer is also ideal for companies that have simple cloud billing — and it's free with an AWS subscription.

Early on in our journey as a company, CloudZero split with legacy data architecture, migrating to Snowflake and opening up a world of resource flexibility. With the centralized, limitless processing power that Snowflake provided, our team could focus more energy on value-added work, less on managing inefficiencies. With a rapidly expanding customer base, Snowflake allowed us to maintain peak velocity, scaling without running into storage-based slowdowns.