Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When your organization uses the cutting edge of technology to function, you may feel like it takes all your time and energy to stay on top of emerging trends. How are you supposed to anticipate what the future will hold when you have to balance those considerations with how to best provide for your customers’ needs today? It’s okay if you don’t have your finger on the pulse 100 percent of the time.

For SaaS companies, the cloud plays a significant role in product creation and delivery. As one of the top drivers of COGS, cloud costs have a major impact on key financial metrics and can dramatically impact revenue and valuation. However, that creates a scenario ripe for conflict: Engineers make important decisions about features and functionality without clear insight into how those decisions will impact spending—and finance continuously gets surprised by seemingly exorbitant cloud bills.

Investors have fallen back in love with profitability. This followed an almost two decade love affair with top-line revenue growth. The growth-at-all-costs paradigm enabled what I call cost-agnostic innovation: If it brings in more customers and revenue, build it — no matter how much it costs. When cash is abundant, investors can afford long-term risk, and cost-agnostic innovation works.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Cost Categories and tagging to help its customers track cloud usage and associated costs. But AWS customers still struggled to connect cloud costs with the products or people who build them despite endless tagging and defining Cost Categories. So, AWS announced Split Charges. This post walks you through what AWS Split Charges are, how they're configured, and how Split Charge rules work.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides over 200 fully-featured services, that aim to make the cloud affordable and cost-efficient for the companies that use the popular cloud provider. Yet, the average AWS customer wastes 30% to 35% of their cloud budget on unnecessary costs. But why? Many organizations running on AWS report challenges managing their infrastructure — and some engineers feel their native tools simply do not cut it for managing their enterprise applications.

For most companies it’s difficult to organize cloud spend because it relies on manual effort, like tagging. At CloudZero, we’re dedicated to helping customers make sense of their cloud investment without manual and repetitive work. Our code-driven approach to cost allocation makes it easy for customers to organize spend even if they have poor tagging, shared resources, or containerized infrastructure. Quite simply, we organize cloud spend better than anyone else in the world.

The past two years have seen erratic cloud spend thanks to the upheaval caused by the global pandemic. Looking ahead to 2022, business is beginning to normalize. Within that “new normal,” there is no question that cloud is more popular than ever, and Kubernetes is at an all-time high. Some companies are continuing to operate remote, or find that they are thriving thanks to an investment in the cloud.

Making better decisions doesn’t always require more data. Finding the right data and making sure the right people have it at the right time does. This is particularly important for companies that use the cloud. Using cloud financial planning solutions is an excellent way to automate, extend, and align goals with business outcomes in light of the cloud’s complexity. The solution can also help eliminate cumbersome, error-prone manual processes.

As a framework for goal-setting, the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) methodology is an incredibly useful tool when implemented properly. It can help your engineering team better plan and stay aligned toward common objectives through the duration of the development process. On an individual level, OKRs can also encourage each team member to make personal progress toward their own goals or common team goals that would benefit the company.

AWS currently offers over 200 services. Some of those make up the AWS Cost Management suite. This group comprises AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost Categories, and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection. Budgets and Cost Explorer are an excellent pair of complementary tools in this group. They have similarities that cause users to wonder if they need both and, if so, why. Here is a brief overview of the differences between AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer.