Its that time again, it’s the end of the year and it’s time to reflect on the things that have happened in the technology world and think about what went well, what didn’t go so well, where cloud providers are investing, and where we think they might be going in 2024.

Practical IT Service Management (ITSM) can be challenging when considering the growth of users and services to support. Additionally, ongoing trends in distributed enterprises with remote workforces, hybrid cloud, and cost-based pressures force companies to do more with less. Atop the usual demands, ITSM teams increasingly expect integrations with observability and security, giving IT support teams a single pane of glass across their roles and responsibilities.

Discover the key differences, pros, and cons of SaaS vs Self-hosted. Learn what best serves your business and what to look out for with Control Plane.

Cloud computing offers many advantages over on-premises environments, including scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. Yet, simply using a “lift and shift” strategy — where you move your application as-is from an on-premise environment to the cloud with minimal, if any, modification — can lead to several issues (such as inefficient design, bloated costs, etc.).

Virtual Machines (VMs) act as the foundation for the evolution of cloud computing. Business organizations utilizing virtualization for their applications will operate flawlessly only when the corresponding VM resources function without interruptions. A cloud enterprise’s expenditure on VM resources is frequently high, as pricing varies according to its service tier.

Azure VM Reservations are the best solution for optimizing cloud expenses. Users can obtain discounted prices for virtual machines in Microsoft Azure by committing to a one- or three-year term. This strategic approach ensures predictable costs, enhances budget management, and is ideal for workloads with consistent resource requirements. Leveraging Azure VM Reservations empowers businesses to achieve significant cost savings while maintaining flexibility and scalability in the cloud infrastructure.

Cost optimization is critical to managing any cloud-based service, including Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service that allows you to scale your storage and throughput across regions. Although it offers a highly scalable and flexible platform for creating applications, Azure Cosmos DB cost optimization is important to ensure efficient resource utilization, avoid unforeseen expenses, and estimate costs more accurately.

SaaS providers prefer to host their solutions centrally on the cloud as a single deployment unit and share them across all their customers (tenants) in order to achieve strategic business objectives. To support this, SaaS generally demands cloud-managed services to help implement necessary automation, security, and observability specifically for their multi-tenanted compute layers.

This is the second post in a 3-part series about shifting Observability left. If you have not had a chance to read the first, you can find it here. In today’s complex microservices deployments, gaining visibility into deployments is vital for optimal system performance and scalability. This has become even more important as the tech industry has moved toward microservice architecture reliance. Navigating through logs has become increasingly complex as requirements have grown.