Recent headlines surrounding big-name IPOs, such as that of Slack and Lyft, have highlighted the very real costs of operating in the cloud. Companies like these are on the hook to pay AWS and other public cloud vendors tens or hundreds of millions of dollars every year, just to run their services.
When it comes to cloud strategy, companies rank “cutting costs” as their top priority for 2019, according to a recent Datamation survey. That’s not to say that they plan to cut back on cloud spending in general; in fact, those budgets are very much expected to grow. Rather, companies are looking for ways to reduce unnecessary costs and optimize cloud spend.
DevOps is a very data-driven practice. After the right cultural changes take place within an organization to adopt DevOps, teams often rely heavily on monitoring, measurement, and continuous improvement to keep their projects on track. The best teams use KPIs to benchmark their performance and report up to management. However, there’s one metric your DevOps team might not be tracking: The cloud cost of their engineering decisions.
If you’re a cloud architect or engineering lead, chances are you’ve had a defensive conversation with finance about the AWS bill. Maybe it looked a little something like this… Unfortunately, this scenario is all too familiar, yet understandable from Finance Frank’s point of view. He’s just trying to do his job, but has zero context into which engineering activities are costing the organization so much (or why these costs are variable on a month-to-month basis).
A recent article by The Information: As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills was very interesting and worth a read. The authors examined the AWS spending patterns of five large companies to demonstrate that all were way over budget as it related to AWS spend. They reference Pinterest “spending roughly $190 million on AWS last year, $20 million more than it had initially expected... and Adobe’s bill rose 64%, while Capital One’s jumped 73%; Pinterest’s rose 41%...
We’re back with another giveaway, and this time it includes every icon released by Amazon in their AWS Architecture Icon PowerPoint deck. You can find the original deck here. The link below provides an svg file for every service and resource icon provided by Amazon in the PowerPoint file each grouped by the service category. That is a total of over 300 icons for you to use when creating your architecture diagrams, in SVG format so you never have to worry about size or screen resolution.
A little over a month ago, Jeremy Daly introduced the concept of the #serverless bubble coming out of #ServerlessNYC. In his tweet he said “if you’re in it, a serverless solution seems intuitive. If you’re not, the paradigm shift can seem overwhelming (& unapproachable).”
We read with interest a recent article from CloudBees published in The New Stack: How Culture Will Make or Break Cloud Native DevOps and have seen some highly differing views on where the adoption of DevOps is. The Cloudbees article starts by saying that “Software delivery cycles are becoming faster thanks to DevOps-backed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) as production pipelines are increasingly ported to scale with microservices on cloud-native environments.”
Recently AWS released a new set of icons for all their services. We were really stoked about it, until we opened the file and realized they were low resolution raster icons in a Powerpoint file.
It’s that time of year again. No, not the holidays, it’s time for the yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas for Amazon’s AWS re:Invent 2018. Last year over 40,000 people were in attendance; this year the number is expected to beat 50,000. It’s a safe bet to expect it to be bigger and more exhausting than ever.
