Setting clear and attainable goals for cloud cost optimization keeps your whole organization on track and working toward a common end. The emphasis here is on clear and attainable. In other words, your team must know where they are headed and have full confidence that they can get there.

SaaS companies are known for their strong margins. With gross margins typically in the 60-90% range, even SaaS companies with comparatively weaker margins have a compelling business model when compared with most other industries. Nonetheless, even a few percentage points of margin can have a huge impact on a company’s valuation and overall success. This chart, taken from a great article by Villi Iltche at Two Sigma Ventures, shows the correlation between gross margins and valuation.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) eases deploying and running Kubernetes on the AWS platform. A fully managed Kubernetes service, EKS eliminates the need to install, configure, or maintain Kubernetes nodes or control planes on your own. With EKS, you can leverage the performance, scalability, and availability of AWS infrastructure, along with integrations with multiple AWS compute, storage, security, serverless, and networking services.

Whether you’re new to Kubernetes or a bona fide wizard, it may seem like getting any meaningful cost data out of it is a miracle. This is because many organizations that migrate to Kubernetes unwittingly step into the Black Box of Kubernetes Spend. In pre-Kubernetes life, teams could allocate costs by tagging resources.

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) enables Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to manage, operate, and scale their databases. A managed service, RDS provides seven database engines and multiple instance sizes and types for working with relational databases. AWS also claims RDS can match the performance, scalability, and availability of commercial databases for a tenth of the price. Is this true, and how much does Amazon RDS cost really? This guide explains how Amazon RDS pricing works.

Business leaders frequently need to make decisions that could impact the entire future of a company. Armed with pages of data and financial reports, many executives choose to slash costs, double efforts on certain products over others, or otherwise forge ahead with major decisions about cloud usage, spending, and overall business strategy. Great choices could mean huge profits, but unwise choices could spell doom for the business as a whole.

The Amazon Redshift data cloud provides a fast, secure, and widely accessible data warehouse solution. It is an ideal platform for performing complex analytics and processing large data sets. In addition to supporting multi-parallel processing (MPP), Redshift is also a type of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) database. Yet, one of Redshift’s main selling points is its cost-effectiveness over alternatives like Snowflake and BigQuery. Is this the case? What is the actual cost of Amazon Redshift?

Cloud cost intelligence is a game-changing way to understand where your money is going and what that means for your business. Any company with a cloud services bill can benefit from a cloud cost intelligence strategy that outlines which spending decisions are beneficial and which should be scrapped in favor of something else. But let’s say you have done your background research and you understand what cloud cost intelligence is and why it matters. Where do you go from there?

Accurate, fair budgets make everyone in the company happy. Engineers love when they can build products that make the company money, executives enjoy seeing nice, wide margins, and finance departments celebrate when everything goes according to plan. But keeping the budget for cloud computing reasonable can seem like a lofty goal when your company’s cloud spending seems to change with the direction of the wind.

While Kubernetes enables your team to deliver more value, more rapidly, cost discussions around Kubernetes — and Kubernetes cost monitoring — can be difficult. You have disposable and replaceable compute resources constantly coming and going, on a range of types of infrastructure. Yet at the end of the month, you just get a billing line item for EKS cost and a bunch of EC2 instances.