Around the world, organizations of all sizes rely on Microsoft Azure to bring modern services online—and deliver innovation at scale. Azure provides the flexibility to roll out cloud-based applications at breakneck speed. But running these applications and services in Azure can add complexity for already overworked IT teams, tasked with boosting performance and reducing costs in ever-evolving cloud environments.

In today’s fast-paced business world, the best way to get a handle on your organization’s cloud costs is by using automation to optimize cloud cost and resource utilization. Today, this can be achieved through Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps). FinOps is an operational practice that enables data-driven decision making around cloud costs and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on Kubernetes (K8s) to efficiently manage their containerized workloads. However, many organizations face a significant challenge when it comes to effectively utilizing compute resources, specifically CPU and memory. One Datadog study found that more than 65% of K8s containers use less than 50% of requested memory and CPU. That’s a staggering waste.

Deploying Kubernetes workloads in Azure using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) empowers organizations with the ability to scale with unlimited compute and storage resources. But every organization needs to keep track of its cloud spend and avoid spiraling costs or financial surprises. This makes visibility into cloud costs crucial to understanding cloud and application cost structure.

Infrastructure optimization is the missing piece in your Internal Developer Platform (IDP) resource plane. Here’s how it can help your IDP make an impact, and ideas on how to weave it into your architecture.

Management of cloud costs is a business imperative. Many organizations are embracing cloud financial operations, or FinOps, to help them reduce and manage cloud spend. Typically, at least initially, FinOps practitioners focus on gaining a picture of their cloud environment and the associated cost of their cloud resources. They then utilize these reports to implement cost-cutting measures, such as right-sizing instances, removing unused resources, adjusting instance uptime, or purchasing commitment plans.

New Kubernetes versions can introduce significant changes and security updates. When Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) releases a new version or a security patch, it is the user’s responsibility to be aware of updates and to perform the full update on their side. This can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Until today, Spot Ocean users needed to manually update their AMIs after updating EKS version.

Today’s companies need to determine whether their software rollouts are successful to ensure good user experience, software stability, reliability, and effectiveness during rollouts. To assess their rollouts, they monitor metrics like memory consumption, CPU usage, error rates, and more.

SaaS providers prefer to host their solutions centrally on the cloud as a single deployment unit and share them across all their customers (tenants) in order to achieve strategic business objectives. To support this, SaaS generally demands cloud-managed services to help implement necessary automation, security, and observability specifically for their multi-tenanted compute layers.

What does it take to not only reduce cloud costs but build an efficient approach to both cloud operations and FinOps? NetApp spoke to analyst firm IDC to gain valuable research insights and find the answers to pressing FinOps questions. Watch the series of roundtable interviews below, featuring host Tom Shields, Senior Marketing Director at NetApp; Jon Bock, VP of Marketing at Spot by NetApp; and Jevin Jensen, Research VP of Infrastructure and Operations at IDC.