Cloud computing offers several advantages over legacy on-premises systems, including cost, scalability, and performance. Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 cloud services that can integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows, making it one of the most popular public cloud platforms. AWS strives to make its tools easy to use, but managing resources and services can be challenging.

Managing gas bills has a lot in common with managing cloud spend. In the summer, our gas bill increased with our summer adventures. Sitting home with the kids out of school and the warm summer months was not an option. Likewise, while discounts on gas certainly help, in reality they do not put much of a dent in the overall bill. The cheapest gallon of gas is still the one not used. If you’re a modern cloud-native business, you can’t just stop using the cloud.

When you’re operating in the cloud, making the right decisions is not always easy because there’s a lot of ground to cover, especially with regard to cost. The elastic nature of cloud infrastructure means your costs could quickly spiral out of control if you don’t have guardrails in place to help keep costs down. Properly managing your cloud costs is important, especially for SaaS companies. Cloud spend impacts your COGS, which in turn affects revenue and valuation.

Managing containerized applications or microservices can be difficult. It is even more demanding and error-prone if you do it manually. So, what’s the alternative? Container orchestration. Container orchestration is an automation technology that helps engineers coordinate when containers start and stop, schedule and execute tasks, manage failovers, and perform recovery processes. The technology helps automate these tasks throughout a container's lifecycle.

Great leaders know how to think big. As a VPE or CTO, your leadership role puts you in a position to make important changes and guide policy. But as a technical leader of your company, you’re almost always incredibly busy. It’s impossible to handle every single demand on any given day, which makes prioritization of tasks an important part of your daily decision-making. How do you know you’re making the right choices and working on the items that will make the largest impact?

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we live in a perfect world. In that world, you could check your company’s cloud bills and financial reports and find cleanly organized categories of spending that help you instantly understand where your money is going and why. Your engineers would meticulously label every spend item with useful metadata tags so you can clearly see which costs have increased and which are most affecting your bottom line.

You work hard to deliver a great product to your target market. Yet, when it’s time to price your worth, it’s challenging to set a fair pricing strategy, model, or amount. This anxiety is understandable. If you charge too much, you could lose potential and existing customers. If you are a start-up, this bad first impression can be detrimental to your growth. For larger businesses, some customers may feel you are losing touch and switch to newer or veteran competitors.

In the beginning of cloud computing, before the earliest cost tools came along to give companies a glimpse into their spending, most businesses found it hard to determine where their cloud budget was going. The money disappeared into the black hole of the cloud service provider, and in exchange, the business received cloud services. Achieving any sort of granularity beyond that was next to impossible.

Apptio announced on May 31, 2019, that it had acquired Cloudability, hoping to strengthen its mission through its new product. Cloudability is a multi-cloud financial management platform for enterprises looking for a more unified way to view, understand, and act on cloud cost insight. Cloudability lets enterprises analyze cloud costs across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Apptio Cloudability provides FinOps capabilities as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

AWS did not intend to build Amazon EKS; it simply had to. Kubernetes adoption beamed light years ahead of AWS' own managed container orchestration service. This forced AWS to develop a managed service to accommodate customers who wanted to use upstream Kubernetes but did not want to do the management themselves. As soon as AWS got around to it, it knocked the Kubernetes-based container management service out of the park.