Many businesses operating in the cloud are looking for ways to reduce cloud costs, and enterprises using Google Cloud are no exception. One of the pricing models Google Cloud is offering to users is Committed Use Discounts (CUDs). This pricing model allows customers to commit either to a minimum amount of resource usage or to a minimum amount of spend for a specified term of one or three years. In return for this commitment, customers receive significant discounts compared to on-demand pricing.

Another KubeCon has passed! Now that we have all (hopefully) recovered from the week in Paris with good food, wine, and catching up with colleagues, let’s talk about the important topics that took center stage at KubeCon EU 2024 this year. As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the initial Kubernetes release, it’s evident that the growth and positive impact of containerized computing have revolutionized the industry.

Spot Ocean has been recognized as the sole leader and outperformer in the GigaOm 2024 Radar for Kubernetes Resource Management in the Maturity and Platform Play quadrant. The report highlights solutions that help organizations more effectively manage the increasing complexity of Kubernetes environments in the cloud. GigaOm evaluated a number of vendors on their ability to analyze and optimize Kubernetes resources.

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.

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.