Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Getting to cloud efficiency is both an art and a science. The art has long been CloudZero’s specialty: giving engineers complete visibility into the costs associated with their cloud infrastructure, putting it all in a business context, and helping them make proactive decisions about how to build and scale efficiently. In other words, the art is on the human side. Giving human engineers the visibility and context to understand and control cloud costs.

Implementing any cloud development project can be tricky, and frustrating. Especially when you are pressured with time, reactive approaches, or cost-saving scenarios. However, there are some things you can do to implement solutions in your cloud architecture for long-term scalability and risk mitigation. Rather than short-term fixes until it arises again, consider designing your cloud with failure in mind, or speculating worst-case scenarios. It might sound counterintuitive or obvious.

Ever since its release in September 2014, Kubernetes has been equally powerful and meme-able in the engineering world. For all the magic of its container orchestration and compute resource management, it’s also mysterious and, to many, confounding — especially when it comes time to pay for it. As we’ve written before, migrating to Kubernetes often means losing cost visibility.

As technology advances and business environments become increasingly competitive, your DevOps team has to continuously improve your product. The challenge is to free up their time so that they can release new product features and improve existing ones. Automating repetitive tasks is one way to accomplish this. Manual approaches also tend to generate or miss errors, slow time to market, and fail to test and monitor system health quickly enough.

You’re a savvy SaaS business leader, so you already know the importance of keeping costs low to maximize your margins. What you might not have considered, however, is how tracking unit cost in your cloud spend data can help you achieve optimizations far beyond what you’d get with traditional cost-cutting methods. Keep reading to learn how cloud spend unit costs can drive savings you never knew were possible.

When operating in the cloud, one of the key decisions to make is about which type of architecture to adopt for your business and customer data. This is because choosing cost-effective architecture is key to building profitable SaaS software. Single-tenant and multi-tenant cloud environments are the options to consider. Both types of architecture have security and privacy implications. There’s also the issue of cost, which differs significantly depending on the architecting model you adopt.

As many companies shift from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud computing, they are also rethinking how they handle cloud costs — from accounting to tax reporting. Computing costs are predictable and relatively fixed in traditional IT environments. An organization purchases computing capacity upfront and uses it over time. The total cost of ownership is fairly easier to calculate with this setup. By contrast, cloud computing operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no upfront payments.

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) offers a variety of database instances, which can be confusing at first. In this guide, we'll clarify what each RDS instance class, family, type, and size means in under 15 minutes. Let's start at the beginning.

Cloud computing is among the roles occupied by 9.1 million people in the tech industry. With “tech jobs” appearing in 255,000 Google monthly searches and tech job listings increasing by 25% in the U.S., which are the best cities to pursue a career in tech?

The latest cloud cost news is primarily good news: Each of the major cloud providers released changes that could improve your bottom line: Dive into the details below.