In the last few years, the usage of databases that charge by request, query, or insert—rather than by provisioned compute infrastructure (e.g., CPU, RAM, etc.)—has grown significantly. They’re popular for a lot of the same reasons that serverless compute functions are, as the cost will scale with your usage. No one is using your site? No problem: you’re not charged.

Setting FinOps KPIs helps keep your whole organization aligned toward the same financial goals. However, it takes more than simply setting a broad, company-wide financial goal and turning every employee loose to work on that goal without more specific directions. It’s far better to come up with realistic and achievable goals tailored toward each person or team that will be responsible for them. That’s because KPIs should ideally be focused around the typical persona of each team.

Typically, startup founders and executives must meet with their board of directors each quarter to review the progress of the company. They may talk about broad topics such as total costs and total revenue, and use these numbers as a guide to determine which moves the company should make in the near future. Often missing from the conversation, however, is a clear and detailed discussion of SaaS metrics.

It can be a challenge to measure costs within a SaaS company. While a business with physical inventory can count the number of items sitting on the shelf and the money needed to create, store, and ship those items, operating within the cloud means SaaS companies have to measure their costs through a layer of abstraction. The number of users a given product supports and the resources needed to keep that product up and running could change by the minute.

At CloudZero, the thing we do better than any other cost solution is connect the dots between cloud cost and your businesses. While other solutions offer reporting and dashboards that answer, “How much did we spend?”, CloudZero also enables you to answer “Why?”. Was it because you onboarded a new customer? Did your team push new code? Or did usage of a feature tick up after some clever UX adjustments?

The Kubernetes platform is the standard for orchestrating containerized applications. It’s ideal for large applications running on distributed instances. The problem is that monitoring Kubernetes infrastructure can be notoriously challenging. In this guide, we'll cover Kubernetes monitoring in more detail, including what Kubernetes metrics to track to improve visibility and control over your K8s containers, apps, microservices, etc.

Identifying great business optimization opportunities is tougher than it seems. You often need to weigh the projected revenue and costs of taking a new path against the potential opportunity costs of not taking that path. Not only is this an apples-to-oranges comparison, but also a “what if” scenario riddled with variables. For instance, what if slashing costs makes the customer experience so much slower and more frustrating that sales decline and you wind up losing revenue?

To optimize its cloud investments, your organization needs internal stakeholders to act on shared knowledge about its cloud costs and cloud usage. But in practice, it’s difficult for organizations to gain a high degree of clarity about their cloud spending. The factors contributing to cost data are not normally visible to all stakeholders, and it’s often impossible to attribute costs to the teams, services, and applications that incurred them.

Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the two most popular cloud providers today. They both offer a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, you'll find products covering multiple computing areas, such as compute, storage, analytics, and networking. You can also deploy AWS or Azure services in the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid setup.

Kubernetes has broken down barriers as the cornerstone of cloud-native application infrastructure in recent years. In addition, cloud vendors offer flexibility, speedy operations, high availability, SLAs (service-level agreement) that guarantee your service availability, and a large catalog of embedded services. But as organizations mature in their Kubernetes journey, monitoring and optimizing costs is the next stage in their cloud-native transformation.