For SaaS companies, the cloud plays a significant role in product creation and delivery. As one of the top drivers of COGS, cloud costs have a major impact on key financial metrics and can dramatically impact revenue and valuation. However, that creates a scenario ripe for conflict: Engineers make important decisions about features and functionality without clear insight into how those decisions will impact spending—and finance continuously gets surprised by seemingly exorbitant cloud bills.

Don’t let your organization fall victim to data exposure; a well-defined strategy will cover all aspects of the cloud shared responsibility model and keep your data secure. Not long ago, security concerns were the number one reason IT executives hesitated to move workloads to the cloud. Much has changed since then. Security is now considered one of the great strengths of both cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. But that doesn’t mean total security is assured.

Over the last two decades, we have seen companies move to the cloud in hordes and presently, the cloud is often the default option for almost all new enterprises. Only companies in a very narrow niche are sticking to on-premise solutions. And the trend is expected to continue. In 2021 alone, the end-user spending in cloud computing was around 482 bn USD.

Step Functions, the serverless finite state machine service from AWS. With DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, it forms the core of serverless AWS services. If you have tasks with multiple steps and you want to ensure they will get executed in the proper order, Step Functions is your service of choice. It offers direct integrations with many AWS services, so you don’t need to use Lambda Functions as glue. This can improve the performance of your state machine and lower its costs.

With our recent announcement regarding the general availability of Ocean for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), I decided to migrate one of our production services. The service was already running on AKS, but will now be managed by Spot’s Ocean for AKS. TL;DR: The results are pretty cool, as I was able to cut 82% out of the existing spending for this AKS cluster. You can see the results in the screen capture below.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s multi-tenant, cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. It takes care of authentication and authorization of user and application identities.

Heroku and AWS are two of the common choices available for cloud hosting. Heroku is a Platform as Service (PaaS) provider that helps startups develop business applications with simplicity and without needing DevOps expertise in the team. Not only does it provide resources automatically, but you can deploy your applications with just a single click. Heroku has been a top choice for developers for years as it speeds up development cycles by providing fully managed infrastructure and application deployment.

AWS announced the release of the Lambda Function URLs feature today. In this post, I describe what it is, how it works, and how you can benefit from it. API Gateway and AWS Lambda is a potent combination and lets you build REST APIs without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. API Gateway offers many powerful features out-of-the-box, including: Understandably you pay a premium for these features.