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.

With the increasing popularity and adoption of native cloud and serverless systems organizations are starting to demand that DevOps better understand - and manage - cloud costs. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

We have read with great interest the recently released The New Stack ebook entitled: Guide to Serverless Technologies. It is a great report with great insights! We encourage you to read it as well (it's free!). We have recently closed our own survey and are tabulating the results and have seen many similarities and some differences in the responses. Weighing in on the findings of the New Stack survey in advance of releasing our report, we wanted to comment on three key themes from this eBook…

Have you been bitten by unexpected costs in the cloud? Whether you are all in with serverless, cloud-native services, on demand and reserved instances, or you build systems and applications with all those things, it is very likely you have had a bad experience with unexpected costs. Why is that? Let me ask you, what is your DevOps tool for observing cost?

Reserved instances are one of those things that, when you first hear about them, you say, “Wow! I could save a lot of money!” And then you start to try and figure out how many you need? What sizes? Which operating systems? In which regions? Should they be convertible? Should I choose a 1-year or 3-year term? All up-front, partial up-front, or no up-front? How much compute am I actually going to need over that term?

If it hasn’t happened already, someone in your organization will soon ask you to explain your AWS bill. Depending on the complexity of your cloud environment, you will consider the bill to be something between a riddle and an incomprehensible and unbreakable code. We know, we’ve been there.

The year is 2020 and you are responsible for ensuring the efficient and reliable operations of millions of dollars of cloud computing infrastructure. Things have changed a lot in the past few years, even more so from the days when you first moved from on-premise and into AWS.