It’s no secret that AWS bills are confusing. But it’s particularly difficult for the team who actually writes the check to Amazon for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — yet has never personally seen what the inside of the AWS portal looks like (and probably never will).

CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence solution that puts engineering in control of cloud cost. We set out to disrupt the cost management and optimization space by building a solution that was designed around the way engineers work — so cost becomes a tradeoff during the software development process, rather than a massive disruption. We often get asked what actually makes us such an engineering-friendly solution? Well, here are seven reasons why engineering and DevOps teams love CloudZero.

Technical debt is an important — but often unclear — concept for engineering teams. In software development, technical debt, also called code debt or tech debt, is defined as the cost of refactoring a piece of code or system to keep it working efficiently. It can be caused by outdated architecture, a change in requirements, or the result of choosing an easier solution instead of a better, but more difficult one.

As a cloud cost intelligence company, we often like to say “every line of code is a buying decision”. If you’re running on AWS or one of the other big cloud providers, you know that a simple decision about how to architect an application can have a significant impact on your future cost of goods sold (COGS). However, in my experience, many engineering teams don’t discuss cost — at least not until it’s already become a problem.

This is a follow up to a blog series where we explore DIY cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimization tools. In the first, we investigated how Lyft, Netflix, Segment, Expedia, and Slack built theirs. Check it out here. “Build versus buy” is the eternal question for every engineering and DevOps team setting out to solve a technical problem. In the cloud cost monitoring and optimization world, both options can take on many forms.