When Azure Savings Plans for Compute were introduced in late 2022, many assumed they were designed to replace Azure Reservations (Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances). But that’s not the case — and it still isn’t. Instead, Azure Savings Plans and Reservations can work hand in hand and complement your other Azure cost optimization strategies. That said, maximizing the benefits of each option isn’t always straightforward.

For DevOps teams, ideal cloud deployment tools mean automation, consistency, and operational reliability. For CTOs, they ensure faster time to market, scalability, and efficiency. And for CFOs, cost-effectiveness and healthy margins are the name of the game. This is our hand-picked list to help you choose the right cloud deployment tools for your organization’s specific needs.

Managing and knowing where your cloud spend goes is nearly impossible without the right cloud cost management tools. Cloud-native, distributed technologies like microservices, containers, and Kubernetes can make it even more difficult to have full visibility into resource usage — and the associated costs. This cost information is also often buried in rows and columns of text on cloud providers’ bills. In addition, a lot of cloud cost management tools are clunky and inexact.

A reliable notifications system can send highly scalable, multi-protocol messages — via email, SMS, or apps — all from one platform. For example, you can send timely cost anomaly alerts directly to your developers on Slack to alert them to potential overspending before it becomes a board meeting emergency. So, what does this have to do with Amazon SNS pricing? Let’s start at the beginning to better understand what you’re paying for when you get that AWS SNS bill.

The weather may be frightful in most parts of the U.S. right now, but these cloud cost updates are pretty delightful (if we do say so ourselves). Here’s the top cloud news that dropped in January 2025: Enjoy!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 fully-featured services. AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Lambda, and the AWS Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are some of the most critical services you should become familiar with. We’ve previously covered Amazon ECS vs. EKS vs. Fargate for managing and deploying containers. This guide will explain how Amazon EC2, Lambda, ECS, and S3 compare and when you’ll want to use each.

Datadog and New Relic didn’t become some of the best observability platforms today by accident. Unlike traditional monitoring tools, both are built from the ground up to be cloud-native. This design is crucial for tracking system health across hybrid cloud infrastructure, modern applications, and microservices/containerized architectures. Both platforms also offer more flexible pricing models than the traditional subscription-based pricing you’ll see elsewhere.

Amazon Aurora offers up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL and three times that of PostgreSQL. Its architecture combines the database engine with a cloud-native, SSD-based storage system built for high I/O operations to achieve this. That said, AWS Aurora pricing can be a real headscratcher for customers, with concerns about the cost structure, pricing components, and ways to cut expenses.

In the last few weeks, industry headlines once again brought the need for businesses to have complete cost visibility and proactive cost management strategies to the forefront of the constantly accelerating cloud and AI landscape. That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest product releases, designed to supercharge your cloud cost intelligence with deeper integrations into industry leaders like AWS and OpenAI.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Savings Plans to offer customers a more flexible and discounted pricing model than Reserved Instances. Like Reserved Instances, AWS Savings Plans offer discounts for longer-term commitments. You can learn more about the differences between Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans here. In this post, we’ll quickly explain AWS Savings Plans, how they work, and what they can and cannot do for you.