Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For many organizations, cloud costs are a mystery. Beyond knowing their total cloud spend, businesses have little insight into the biggest drivers of their costs, let alone how they can better manage their cloud investment. With on-premise infrastructure, organizations have a predictable understanding of their costs, but the same cannot be said for the cloud.

According to AWS, “Creating a software system is a lot like constructing a building. If the foundation is not solid, structural problems can undermine the integrity and function of the building.” This is especially true when it comes to the cloud. If an organization doesn’t effectively oversee key areas of its foundation, it’s likely the result is not going to be successful. When it comes to cloud management, we look at it through the lens of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Like any SaaS organization, CloudZero cares about our COGS, margin, and unit cost. As you can imagine, we have a fair amount of insight into how those numbers are changing every day thanks to being “customer zero” on our cloud cost intelligence platform. Talking with other companies, I often find that the best organizations understand that measuring the cost implications of new products and features once you’ve deployed them can be too late.

If you're in FP&A, it can sometimes feel like outsiders think your job is all about routine tasks, like tracking budgets and reporting on cost — which couldn’t be further from the truth. A great FP&A professional deeply understands the business, has a strong command of its metrics, and uses that data to serve as a trusted advisor and partner to stakeholders. You’re not just a “counter” and “tracker” — you’re a driver of strategic outcomes.

Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) is an important milestone in every company’s cloud computing journey. While it is usually not the first milestone — which is focused on delivering value to customers — this milestone is reached as the company grows and scales. Turning ad-hoc cloud initiatives into a company-wide strategy, the CCOE helps the business to manage the cloud process and adopt best practices.

Rolled out in 2011, AWS ElastiCache has grown to become one of the most prominent Amazon services among developers. So much so that in the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, one of its fully-managed engines was voted by developers as the most loved database. On the flip side, however, AWS ElastiCache happens to be infamous for its high costs. Although it offers a flexible pricing system that charges you only for what you use, the usage bill can get pretty high for some users.

As a cloud cost intelligence platform, we spend nearly every day talking to companies about their cloud cost — and there’s something we’ve noticed — people don’t generally have the warm and fuzzies for their cloud cost management tools. You know, the ones that have been around for a while, that you use to build reports about your cloud spend? We won’t refer to them by name. These popular tools have really given the whole category a bit of a bad rap.

Automation does not only eliminate the mundaneness of performing repetitive tasks, it can also help reduce errors and mistakes. Good cloud infrastructure encourages cloud automation. That should be one of the main motivators of implementing it. As ubiquitous as the idea of cloud computing has become in the last decade, there is still a lot of demystification to be done. People still don't fully understand its potential. Yes, it can save you money and time but how?

Whether you've recently migrated to the cloud, or you've been operating there for awhile now, you've likely realized how challenging it can be to understand exactly where your cloud spend goes and what drives your costs. Using a cloud service provider can offer many benefits, like the ability to easily scale up and down based on need, but unless you're using the right services and tools, your costs can quickly spiral out of control.

It’s been a great month for exciting insights about the role that engineering must play in driving profitable innovation.