If you’re a cloud architect or engineering lead, chances are you’ve had a defensive conversation with finance about the AWS bill. Maybe it looked a little something like this… Unfortunately, this scenario is all too familiar, yet understandable from Finance Frank’s point of view. He’s just trying to do his job, but has zero context into which engineering activities are costing the organization so much (or why these costs are variable on a month-to-month basis).

A recent article by The Information: As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills was very interesting and worth a read. The authors examined the AWS spending patterns of five large companies to demonstrate that all were way over budget as it related to AWS spend. They reference Pinterest “spending roughly $190 million on AWS last year, $20 million more than it had initially expected... and Adobe’s bill rose 64%, while Capital One’s jumped 73%; Pinterest’s rose 41%...

We’re back with another giveaway, and this time it includes every icon released by Amazon in their AWS Architecture Icon PowerPoint deck. You can find the original deck here. The link below provides an svg file for every service and resource icon provided by Amazon in the PowerPoint file each grouped by the service category. That is a total of over 300 icons for you to use when creating your architecture diagrams, in SVG format so you never have to worry about size or screen resolution.

A little over a month ago, Jeremy Daly introduced the concept of the #serverless bubble coming out of #ServerlessNYC. In his tweet he said “if you’re in it, a serverless solution seems intuitive. If you’re not, the paradigm shift can seem overwhelming (& unapproachable).”

We read with interest a recent article from CloudBees published in The New Stack: How Culture Will Make or Break Cloud Native DevOps and have seen some highly differing views on where the adoption of DevOps is. The Cloudbees article starts by saying that “Software delivery cycles are becoming faster thanks to DevOps-backed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) as production pipelines are increasingly ported to scale with microservices on cloud-native environments.”

Recently AWS released a new set of icons for all their services. We were really stoked about it, until we opened the file and realized they were low resolution raster icons in a Powerpoint file.

It’s that time of year again. No, not the holidays, it’s time for the yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas for Amazon’s AWS re:Invent 2018. Last year over 40,000 people were in attendance; this year the number is expected to beat 50,000. It’s a safe bet to expect it to be bigger and more exhausting than ever.

With the increasing popularity and adoption of native cloud and serverless systems organizations are starting to demand that DevOps better understand - and manage - cloud costs. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

We have read with great interest the recently released The New Stack ebook entitled: Guide to Serverless Technologies. It is a great report with great insights! We encourage you to read it as well (it's free!). We have recently closed our own survey and are tabulating the results and have seen many similarities and some differences in the responses. Weighing in on the findings of the New Stack survey in advance of releasing our report, we wanted to comment on three key themes from this eBook…