The cloud computing space is constantly evolving — a fact that can sometimes set the stage for inconsistencies and confusion around both industry terminology and best practices. Cloud agnostic is one of those confusing terms, as is cloud native. But with the number of cloud agnostic and cloud native applications growing, it’s important to set the record straight.

Picture a fast-growing company that depends heavily on AWS for its infrastructure but doesn’t use AWS Budget Alerts. One month, they received an AWS bill 50% higher than expected. Without any warnings, they could not address the cost anomalies in real time. This led to budget overruns and strained financial planning. The engineering team couldn’t explain to the finance operations how that happened. This situation highlights the need for AWS Budget Alerts.

MongoDB has earned quite the credentials as a flexible, high scalability, and reliable database management system. Yet, it isn’t flawless. Several MongoDB alternatives now offer superior advantages for specific use cases. In this guide, we’ll share insights into the strengths and weaknesses of leading alternatives to MongoDB. By the end of this post, you will be in a better position to choose your next DBMS with confidence.

Cloud-native applications continue to evolve and grow in complexity. And that complexity hurts the most when managing Kubernetes costs in Azure. AKS cost optimization may seem obvious, but it might also seem difficult to achieve. Microsoft’s fully managed Kubernetes service can help you run, manage, and deploy containerized applications. And while it optimizes performance, it can cause unexpected costs when improperly managed.

CloudBolt helps optimize cloud usage by offering robust automation and cloud cost management features. Still, some organizations may find it lacks the features and integration they need. Also, its pricing structure might only be suitable for some budgets, leading businesses to consider other solutions in the market. So, what are the best Cloudbolt alternatives?

As FinOps programs scale — particularly within larger enterprise organizations — it becomes increasingly important for different roles within the organization to have access to different sets of data to make informed, proactive decisions related to their specific areas of responsibility.

Developing an AWS tagging strategy can feel like wrangling different cooks in the same kitchen. Engineers want to innovate, fix issues, and improve existing code. Finance wants to know if the company is making a healthy return on technology investments. Yet, the cloud is like a menu without the pricing. In their quest for continuous improvement, engineers can innovate without slowing down. And this can consume more computing resources than expected, leading to a surprise AWS bill.

In April of this year, we released “The State of Cloud Cost in 2024” report. As with our previous cloud cost survey from 2022, this one was packed with data on how finance and engineering professionals use the cloud and how they manage the costs associated with that use. If you’re in the SaaS world, you’ll definitely want to tune in to this webinar we’ve created to discuss the results of the survey: Deep Dive Into The 2024 State Of Cloud Cost Report.

Cloud computing offers several undeniable benefits to businesses. Some of the biggest ones are agility, cost savings, data recovery, and developing new apps and services to meet changing customer needs. Despite these benefits, the cloud can be complex, demand specialized skills, and require companies to follow up-to-date cloud security best practices. Why is that a problem? A 2020 report shows that 68% of companies cited misconfiguration as their biggest cloud architecture challenge going into 2021.

It can be challenging to translate complex engineering concepts to business leaders. If you frame things well, though, you can have more productive conversations that lead to greater alignment between engineering and the rest of the business. With that in mind, I’d like to share some of my recommendations for discussing cost with your leadership team — and hope it might help you have stronger cost conversations.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides more than 200 services. Among those, Amazon Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate help deploy and manage containers. Choosing between these services can be challenging. They seem similar on the surface (and are all popular). But each offers unique benefits and limitations. In this guide, we compare the three services, discussing the best use cases for each, and helping you choose the best fit for your business.

In 2022, Netflix’s video streaming service had almost 231 million subscribers, up from 26 million in 2011. Revenues for the Los Gatos giant topped $31 billion in 2022 alone. Netflix also welcomed a startling 7.66 million paid subscribers in Q4, 2022, beating the 4.5 million subs expectations. On the earnings call, CFO Spenser Neumann said that the company wouldn’t be in the business if they didn’t believe it would return more than 10% of the revenue.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly competitive. For SaaS companies, establishing a unique competitive advantage is crucial. Implementing a tailored SaaS pricing strategy effectively sets companies apart. This approach not only boosts operational efficiency but also enhances profit margins. Choosing the optimal SaaS pricing strategy requires careful consideration of various factors.

Syncing files and folders across multiple devices, updating them between remote team members, and sharing them across individuals and teams are all essential aspects of running a modern business. Cloud storage services enable small businesses and enterprises to manage their data on-demand, scalably, and in a largely fail-safe manner. Their cloud infrastructure enables you to store documents, spreadsheets, videos, and other types of data formats online.

There are several high-performing database services available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). When you need to handle caching, Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), real-time data, session stores, or personalization, you can choose one of these options.

Kubernetes is increasingly becoming the standard way to deploy, run, and maintain cloud-native applications that run inside containers. Kubernetes (K8s) automates most container management tasks, empowering engineers to manage high-performing, modern applications at scale. Meanwhile, several surveys, including those from VMware and Gartner, suggest that inadequate expertise with Kubernetes has held back organizations from fully adopting containerization.

We all want growth, but we often find ourselves unequipped to deal with it. It’s a bit like going to the gym, lifting weights, and seeing real results, only to realize that you no longer fit into your old clothes. Now you have to decide if you want to modify them or buy new clothes. We can use this very simple analogy to understand the differences between horizontal and vertical scaling.

A decade after launching Reserved Instances (RIs), Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Savings Plans as a more flexible alternative to RIs. AWS Savings Plans are not meant to replace Reserved Instances; they are complementary. SPs and RIs have some significant differences that make each better suited to specific uses. As an example, while Savings Plans are applicable to both EC2 and Fargate instances, RIs are only applicable to EC2 instances.

The trend continues to accelerate – even faster now. Cloud computing was already booming before 2020. But in the following two years, remote work flourished, and cloud adoption soared. Some companies have since returned to the office. Others are adopting hybrid models, where staff work from home and in the office. Yet there’s more to the rise and rise of cloud computing than remote working.

We recently explored what the cloud is and how it has evolved over 60 years. Yet, cloud computing emerged into what it is today in 2002, when Amazon, the e-commerce giant, sought a more efficient way to expand its online marketplace. So, it is not surprising that the company’s cloud services subsidiary (AWS), which launched in 2006, is the largest Cloud Service Provider (CSP) today. This CSP marketshare guide shares the details of the cloud infrastructure market, the dominant players, and more.

Erik Peterson, our CTO and Founder here at CloudZero, recently hosted a webinar-style interview with Matthew “MJ” Jackson, DevOps Lead at Drift. This interview took a deep dive into the methods Drift used to take control of their cloud spending. If you own, manage, or otherwise have any stake in a SaaS company that heavily utilizes the cloud, you’ll want to read on to see the highlights of this conversation.

Before the development of AWS cost estimation tools, users faced challenges in predicting cloud costs due to complex pricing structures and multiple service configurations. This often led to surprise charges and made budgeting and optimizing cloud costs difficult. To address these issues, AWS introduced its own cost estimation tools. These include the Cost Explorer, the Pricing Calculator, AWS Budgets, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Trusted Advisor, and the AWS Cost and Usage Report.

Most organizations migrate to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud from on-premises data centers. However, others have switched from another Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform to AWS. The most common reason we hear for choosing AWS is cost savings. As the largest public cloud provider, AWS leverages economies of scale, making its cloud services more affordable than those a company would have to build itself. Yet, not every organization can claim that AWS has saved it money.

Businesses are increasingly interested in cloud economics. For instance, what are the financial implications of moving to the cloud versus staying on-premises? And what’s the best strategy for optimizing cloud consumption to get the best value from cloud resources? In this guide, we’ll look at some of the key concepts of economics in cloud computing, and how your business can leverage cloud cost intelligence to maximize the value of your cloud investment.

AWS ALB was developed to simplify the management of modern web traffic while enhancing application scalability, security, and performance. And like any other AWS service, understanding AWS ALB pricing is essential for managing cloud costs effectively. This guide offers a comprehensive overview of AWS ALB, detailing its key use cases and pricing structure.

The cloud offers on-demand computing resources, the ability to increase or reduce usage as needed, and the flexibility to pay only for what you use. But if you’ve been building on the cloud for some time, you know that the last part isn’t exactly straightforward. For example, leaving aggressive product features, engineering sessions, or testing projects unchecked can quickly waste thousands, even millions of dollars in a matter of days.

Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on much, but when it comes to generative AI, they’ve managed to find 32 billion points of agreement. On May 15, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a roadmap that would have the U.S. government spending $32 billion annually by 2026 to drive AI-related innovation. The U.S. isn’t alone; AI spending in India is growing at an annual average rate of 31.5%, and will exceed $5 billion by 2027.

According to Amazon, EC2 Spot Instances can save you up to 90% of your spending on On-Demand Instances. It’s been proven that Reserved EC2 instances are cheaper than On-Demand ones. But, Spot Instances can offer even bigger discounts. Despite these cost benefits, Spot Instances have many caveats that make them unsuitable for some operations and processes. Even Amazon emphasizes this. Although this EC2 can save you a lot of money, some situations are best for On-Demand or Reserved Instances.

In recent years, cloud financial management has evolved beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. The overwhelm has led too many companies to struggle to accurately monitor, allocate, and optimize their cloud costs. This issue cost companies about 30% of their cloud budgets in 2022 alone, according to Gartner. With FinOps, you can prevent this bleeding without sacrificing innovation. Yet, taking a manual approach to FinOps can be inefficient and error-prone.

June was a hot month — both in terms of the temperature in North America and because of the FinOps news that has been rolling down the pipeline! (Around here, there’s always excitement in the air when a major FinOps event goes off without a hitch.)

As an engineer or CTO, you already know that monitoring your tech stack is essential for maintaining optimal performance, security, and health. The thing is, building and hosting an observability platform for your full stack’s logs, metrics, and more is quite time-consuming and can be costly. One of the top contenders if you are seeking a SaaS-based monitoring and observability tool is Datadog. Perhaps you already use Datadog but would like to switch to another observability platform.

The majority of cloud providers let you upload data for free. But moving that same data across their services, to another cloud provider, or back to your own data center comes at a cost commonly known as AWS egress costs. The cost may be cents per gigabyte (GB). But once you exceed the free tier’s 100 GB, it starts to add up. In this guide, we explain how AWS egress pricing works. With this understanding, along with the cost-saving tips we’ll share, you can reduce your egress costs like a pro.

You’re not alone if you’ve had trouble understanding Amazon DynamoDB pricing. Getting a handle on DynamoDB costs can be complex and tedious. But with the right tools and resources, it doesn’t have to be. In this bookmarkable guide, we’ll break it down step-by-step so you can tell what drives DynamoDB costs.

While CloudZero has always been a leader in the ingestion, allocation, and analysis of cloud cost data across the broadest set of cloud providers, our team is constantly working on ways to make it easier for customers to get the absolute most value out of the data they send to our platform.

Automation is something you hear a lot about in cloud computing. When done well, it helps save time and eliminates human error. Automation can also help you innovate faster because it frees up your IT talent to focus on innovation – rather than repetitive tasks. But did you know cloud orchestration could be the real reason for those benefits — and not really cloud automation?

Azure storage pricing can be complex, with multiple tiers, storage types, and payment options to consider. This complexity can lead to unexpected costs, ruining your Azure cloud budget. Additional fees for read/write transactions, metadata storage, snapshots, and early deletion fees can add up. The good thing is you can review and adjust your storage configurations to minimize unnecessary costs.