Author Jeff Duntemann said a good tool improves how you work, whereas a great tool transforms your thinking. Companies that want to improve their cloud-based operations can rely on cloud metrics as an effective tool for transforming their cloud operations. You can't fix what you don't measure. Cloud metrics are the logs of data that a cloud infrastructure or application generates.

Although refactoring isn’t typically listed as one of the core phases of the software development lifecycle, you cannot leave it out if you intend to keep code running efficiently. The unfortunate thing about software is, it doesn’t usually age very well. Even seemingly perfect source code progressively decays over time — due to the ever-morphing tech ecosystem.

FinOps is one of the latest buzzwords in cloud computing. It’s a merger of two important departments — finance and operations — and describes “cloud financial operations,” (also called cloud financial management or cloud cost management).

A fundamental requirement for building a profitable product is finding ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency. When you’re operating in the cloud, it’s almost impossible to gain this insight without data. This is where data-driven software development comes in. Data-driven development is a software engineering approach that relies on data to guide the development process.

If you are fine using a conventional cloud cost management tool, Apptio's Cloudability can be a helpful tool. It promises to enable DevOps, IT, and finance to optimize cloud resources for quality, speed, and cost. A large business with a high cloud spend, a team of 5-10 engineers, and a budget for expert guidance is an ideal match for Cloudability.

According to Amazon, On-Demand Instances are best reserved for short-term processes with uneven workloads that cannot be interrupted. This might partly explain why such EC2 instances are exceedingly popular with AWS users. On the flip side, however, it turns out that On-Demand Instances are also getting dumped for the sake of cloud cost optimization. Our recent Spot Instances guide, for instance, advises AWS users to consider making a switch and, consequently, enjoy up to 90% cost savings.

EC2 instances come with a spider web of charges — when you take a look at your bill, you’ll see there are hundreds of unique line items connected to your usage. In addition to the instance, you’re also billed for storage, data transfer, and networking associated with that instance. It’s important to fully understand those charges so you can find ways to optimize your costs.

Over the past decade, businesses have flocked to the public cloud, with the promise of faster innovation, improved scalability — and of course, cost savings. Yet for many companies, the reality of cloud migration has been a different story. CFOs are blindsided by high costs and uncontrolled spending. Meanwhile, engineering teams struggle to justify and explain their spend — often frustrated that finance doesn’t understand, even when spend is growing healthily along with the business.

FP&A is a strategic part of the finance organization and has the potential to drive important business outcomes. When done right, it can have a major positive impact on the future of the business. When done poorly, it can slow a company down. The role of FP&A has evolved. Today it isn’t just about taking inputs and crunching numbers — it’s about being a strategic advisor to the organization.

Serverless services save time. When you switch to serverless architecture, you offload redundant cloud management activities to your cloud provider and gain more time to focus on the most important parts of your business — development and innovation. Even better, you only pay for what you use, so you don’t have to worry about committing to reserved instances or committing to a savings plan. But there’s a catch.