Cloud costs can come with significant sticker shock, especially since many businesses do not have an easy way to track or predict actual cost before the bill arrives. However, there are several architectural changes that businesses can make that will help rein in cloud spend. In some cases, optimal engineering decisions should be made up-front, while in other cases certain areas should be monitored over time to identify opportunities to retool architecture and optimize cloud costs.

School’s out for… Autumn? That’s right, while you were avoiding the back-to-school rush at Office Depot, cutting the crusts off PB&Js, and taking the layers out of mothballs (confession: I have never seen let alone used a single mothball), Serverless Summer School began winding down and is now over for the season. Until next year, school-themed Stackery livestreams!

Did you know that CloudFormation tags don’t automatically propagate to some resource types? Chief among these are CloudWatch log groups, which means you can’t include them in your cost monitoring (via cost allocation tags) among other things. The only way to tag CloudWatch log groups right now is via API calls. You can do this with the AWS SDK, or using the AWS CLI. This is hugely inconvenient!

If you run Microsoft’s Hyper-V as your virtualisation platform rather than the ever popular VMware ESX then you probably want a way to manage your Hyper-V hosts as well as the virtual machines that reside on this. Well you can do a lot of the functions that SCVMM does with the free tool for managing Hyper-V, the Hyper-V Manager (which comes as part of the Windows Operating System). System Centre Virtual Machine Manager is also called System Centre VMM or SCVMM for short.

There is a lot of pressure on enterprise IT to adopt cloud, and rightfully so. Most enterprises are moving toward multi-tenant, fully managed deployments, but most are seeing a careful, deliberate migration towards public cloud or hosted environments. Identifying and assessing challenges is the key point before taking any steps to modernize or migrate applications.

Cost is a big reason many dev teams are transitioning to serverless. However, there are still some ways costs can creep up on you in serverless apps. The biggest culprit I’ve found in my own experience is the VPC resource. Because adding a VPC to a serverless stack is ridiculously easy in Stackery, I’ve sometimes gotten carried away. I’d deploy a stack with a VPC for testing, then quickly forget about it.

In a recent post, we talked about AWS CloudTrail and saw how CloudTrail can capture histories of every API call made to any resource or service in an AWS account. These event logs can be invaluable for auditing, compliance, and governance. We also saw where CloudTrail logs are saved and how they are structured. Enabling a CloudTrail in your AWS account is only half the task.

What if we told you that most organizations are making simple AWS cost optimization mistakes that lead to surprising monthly cloud bills and unnecessary overspend? As an engineer, you’d probably be relieved to know that many of your organization’s AWS spending spikes are within your team’s control, given access to the right data.

Observability is a common challenge for serverless applications and we believe Lumigo is perfectly positioned to help you tackle this problem. As such, I’m pleased to announce that we have published a new Serverless framework plugin to make it even easier for you to get started.

Now this blog post is only going to cover the two largest cloud providers, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS and only focusing on Infrastructure as a Service (Azure VMs for Azure, and EC2 for AWS) offerings they both provide, but with a bit of a deep dive in to the way they both provide resilience.