Chief Architect at Drift, Freedom Dumalo, recently spoke with the CloudZero team about how they’ve successfully cut cloud costs by $2.4M in just a few months. When the world rapidly transitioned to work from home, Drift, the conversational marketing platform known for their chatbots, saw a spike in their customer utilization. The largest usage spike were among new users experimenting with their free trial. This increase in engagement was a great sign for their business.

After growing Carbon Black from nothing to over 800 employees, Founder and CTO Ben Johnson turned his attention to the security of SaaS applications with new startup Obsidian Security. Obsidian secures companies like Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, Slack and Zoom. This time around, Ben is a seasoned founder and is proactively thinking about how to scale his company with healthy product margins. He uses CloudZero to monitor his AWS costs, detect anomalies, and enable his engineering team.

I was speaking with a VP of Engineering friend at last year’s KubeCon about how to pitch Kubernetes to the C-Suite. The benefits for innovation were clear - containerized microservices empowered her small teams to deliver more value, more rapidly. As is often the case with Boardroom discussions, though, the question of cost was always next. Sure, they want you to innovate - as long as it’s within the constraints of a budget! But cost discussions around Kubernetes can be difficult.

Think of orgs with lots of data and it’s impossible to not think of Netflix. In a new Netflix Technology Blog, titled "Byte Down: Making Netflix’s Data Infrastructure Cost-Effective", their Platform Data Science & Engineering team describe their data infrastructure "which is composed of dozens of data platforms, hundreds of data producers and consumers, and petabytes of data.” At this scale, cost-effectiveness is a critical matter of success and failure.

As cloud environments grow and evolve more rapidly than ever, and with new cloud services emerging every day, achieving and maintaining a high level of organization across hundreds of resources and global teams can seem like a daunting task. However, it’s not impossible, and can be done through tagging. This post will cover the fundamentals of tags, as well as a comprehensive roadmap to developing a tagging strategy.

Innovation drives success. And today more than ever, software drives innovation. No matter what product or service you offer, you’re a software company. You may not sell something called “software,” but successfully building, marketing, delivering, and supporting customers for any product today relies on software and technology. Innovation is what software developers do. And software developers are at the center of what CloudZero does.

Today, you probably wouldn’t blink at the idea of involving security in your development process. In fact, “shifting security left” has become so commonplace in the security industry, that there are conferences and job titles dedicated to SecOps (or DevSecOps or SecDevOps *eye roll emoji*). Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that the massive transition to this mindset took place.

Andreessen Horowitz recently published a blog about the Heavy Cloud Costs and Scaling Challenges of The New Business of AI, in which they describe how AI companies are facing cloud cost challenges, which are impacting their margins. As someone who used to manage a fully home-grown on-site distributed speech recognition platform for an industry leader, I know firsthand that ML can be expensive and challenging to maintain. However, it doesn’t have to be.

Whether it be a tweets about shocking AWS bills or the impact of cloud bills on tech company margins, cloud costs are a hot topic. If you're looking to get up to speed and learn a little more, check out this collection of podcasts, blogs, and articles.

I never used to care about the cost of the systems I built. As an engineer, why would I? Especially in the days before the cloud, infrastructure resources were purchased and procured by somebody who worked many levels above me. Even when I first started building on the cloud, I had to submit requests (again, to somebody many levels above me) for my resources.