“Cost” would seem to underpin almost every decision IT teams make. Sure, business requirements drive overall operations budgets, but it’s always in tension with decades-old certainties about cost. It’s long been the unyielding constant of IT equations. In particular, IT pros migrating application infrastructures out of the data center have discovered the on-premises math of cost containment no longer works.

Serverless computing is one of the fastest-growing areas in software development, along with hybrid clouds and using multi-cloud strategies. The global serverless architecture market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.2% in 2021 through 2026. It will reach $10.29 billion from $4.2 billion in 2020, according to MarketWatch. The serverless approach promises to help developers beat the cons of self-managed and even virtual server infrastructure. But is serverless right for you?

Choosing the right service plan is crucial when you are using Amazon Web Services (AWS). With 170 distinct services, ranging from compute to storage to networking and content delivery — each offered at different price points — the process requires careful consideration to make the right choice for your business. By default, AWS services are available on-demand and you pay a monthly bill for services used.

There’s no question that engineering teams at innovative tech companies are busy. No matter how successful your company is, there’s always a long backlog of feature enhancements that can make it challenging to focus on other priorities. So, it’s no surprise that one of the most common questions we get from companies that engage with us is “How much of an effort will this be for my engineering team?” The short answer is that you can get value within minutes.

The promise of running a business on the cloud is that — in theory, at least — you should be able to scale your infrastructure up and down with your customer utilization. This should lead, again in theory, to less maintenance and more opportunity for innovation.

H.L. Mencken once famously wrote, “…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” More than just a pithy way to frame the entire concept of “cost containment” (whether network-specific cost, the broader category of IT, or the cost of anything else, to be quite honest), it’s an integral aspect of what I’ll be proposing in this and subsequent articles in this series.

There’s no question that the cloud offers efficiencies and innovation opportunities that are near impossible to replicate on-premise. In fact, Amazon reports that companies achieve 31% infrastructure cost savings, as well as 62% more efficient IT infrastructure management, when they move to AWS (and that doesn’t include the many other cost benefits — like improved security and on-demand services). But the extent of those efficiencies can vary.

Businesses are always looking for ways to increase efficiency and eliminate waste. For software-driven companies, DevOps is one approach that helps to achieve this. The goal of DevOps is faster software delivery to the end-user while maintaining high software quality. DevOps enhances collaboration between operations and development teams for faster code deployment. When evaluating the effectiveness of your DevOps model, it is critical to use metrics relevant to your organization.