Every CEO is looking for an edge. Every change in IT — whether we’re talking about the move away from company owned data centers to VMs, or the latest digital transformation we’re seeing today — has always been about gaining a strategic advantage. Companies want to do more at a lower cost, and they want the freedom to pivot quickly without fixed costs.

We’ve talked about how serverless architecture is a great option for companies that are looking to optimize costs. Just like with all app building and developments, monitoring the performance of your implementation is crucial and we, the folks at Dashbird, understand this need all too well – this is why we’ve spent the better part of the past year and a half to create a monitoring and observability solution for AWS Lambda and other Serverless services.

In the context of businesses, the ultimate goal of innovation for technology companies is to drive a profit. This means that even though many software engineering problems can be solved with enough time and budget — just because a business can solve a problem doesn’t mean that they should. Sometimes, even once a team has figured out how to solve an engineering problem, it doesn’t make sense to deploy the solution — because it costs so much to operate.

Every year, I look forward to the release of the annual State of DevOps report (that’s the kind of exciting life I lead!). The evolution and adoption of DevOps in the past decade has been incredible — and this report always helps show what’s the next big thing that high-performing teams are adopting. The 2020 State of DevOps report was just released a couple weeks ago and as usual, it was filled with all kinds of insights.

This is part four of the “Well-Architected Serverless” series. In this post, we’ll talk about the Cost Optimization (COST) pillar of the Well-Architected Framework (WAF). Part 1: Security Part 2: Operational Excellence Part 3: Reliability The COST pillar concerns itself with the money you spend on your cloud infrastructure. It’s important to think about your system’s cost because, in reality, the perfect system won’t be used simply because it’s too expensive.

Cloud cost-efficiency is a crucial ingredient for ensuring business success. However, uncoordinated attempts at reducing costs can create even greater inefficiencies and outright cloud waste. In this post we’ll focus on one example of this – using EC2 spot instances when AWS Savings Plans have already been purchased – and how Spot by NetApp intelligently utilizes all available cloud compute pricing models to eliminate cloud waste and achieve dramatic cost reduction.

If your business is growing, your AWS bill is probably growing with it. Yet, in conference rooms all over the world (or Zoom calls, these days), CFOs are asking “we’re spending how much?!” — while engineering leaders try to explain that the platform is twice as fast and they’ve added some machine learning that is going to absolutely change the game.

On a day-to-day basis, both engineering and product management in software companies involves constant trade-offs. Everyone has a long backlog of tasks and needs to make decisions about what to prioritize on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Figuring out what to tackle first, what to put off for later, and what to say no to is critical both to managing daily workloads as well as to creating product roadmaps that reflect what customers want.

A few years ago, we realized that spending in our AWS product test environment had jumped significantly from one month to the next. We drilled down into the issue and traced it to some RDS database instances that had been spun up to test new product features. No one realized that these expensive instances were left running after the tests were complete, and subsequently racking up charges for several months.

This month, I made the decision to join CloudZero as their new chief revenue officer — a choice I’m incredibly excited about. In the past week, a number of colleagues have asked me to share why I joined the company. After answering the question a few times, I decided to take a minute to collect my thoughts and explain why this incredible company is the next step in my career.