Cloud services have become an indispensable resource for businesses seeking agility, scalability, and innovation. However, with this increased reliance on the cloud comes the challenge of managing and optimizing costs effectively. For Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), understanding and tracking cloud cost metrics is crucial to maintaining financial health and ensuring strategic investments yield the desired returns.

Organizations often assume that switching to Amazon Web Services (AWS) will automatically reduce their on-premises spending. Certainly, cloud-based services like AWS’ Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can offer significant cost savings. Yet overspending on AWS is quite common. How can you tell if moving to AWS is the right decision? What figures would you use to quantify and justify that choice to decision-makers? Enter Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on AWS.

Your customer renewal pricing strategy can make or break your business. You can create the best product in the world, market it masterfully, and provide exceptional customer service, but if your prices aren’t where they need to be, either your customers will churn or you’ll wind up spending way too much money to support a proportionally small revenue stream. Either way, your company will struggle to make ends meet.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a great platform for DevOps and FinOps teams for several reasons. It provides a wide range of services, supports extensive automation, and includes strong collaboration tools. Despite this, AWS can be a complex ecosystem that makes cloud management challenging. The good news is that AWS also offers a suite of tools to help you apply DevOps best practices and cloud cost optimization.

Organizations need highly scalable compute capacity in the cloud to handle fluctuating workloads. This ensures they can meet peak demand without over-provisioning resources or incurring unnecessary costs during low activity periods. Amazon EC2 offers one of the most flexible, on-demand infrastructures that can be scaled to meet business needs. Yet, it isn’t suitable for everyone. In this guide, we’ll explore why that is and share the best EC2 alternatives to consider. But first, a quick recap.

We are often asked about areas where customers overspend on Amazon Web Services (AWS). NAT gateway costs are high due to misplaced data transfers and are definitely near the top of our list. This article will walk you through five steps you can take to find out which data transfers you’re overspending on and how you can eliminate those excess charges.

In today’s digital age, social media and online communication have become an integral part of our daily lives. From scrolling through TikTok and Instagram to sending countless texts and emails, we’re constantly connected. Each minute spent scrolling or sending a quick message may seem harmless, but these small actions add up to a significant carbon footprint. The tech industry accounts for 7% of global emissions and is predicted to rise with the growth of data centers.

Toward the end of Q1 2022, survey findings reported that Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services had, for the first time, eclipsed Amazon Web Services (AWS) in some enterprise categories. According to the respondents, more enterprises preferred Azure because it integrates well with the many Microsoft products they already use. A second reason is that Azure is suitable for running on-premises and at the edge. Some organizations also use Microsoft Azure to avoid vendor lock-in to AWS.

Approximatly 94% of organizations worldwide have adopted cloud computing, with 50% relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their needs. This is mainly due to AWS’s global accessibility, scalability, and reliability. Among AWS services, Amazon S3 stands out as one of the most widely used. Modern businesses demand robust storage solutions, and S3 delivers with 99.99% durability. However, the service does have some limitations, leading some users to explore Amazon S3 alternatives.

The purpose of cloud monitoring is to identify, observe, track, and manage cloud infrastructure components and services. Cloud monitoring helps organizations ensure their services meet customer expectations of performance, availability, and security. Companies also use cloud monitoring to learn how users interact with their business websites, applications, and other digital touchpoints.

You might wonder how companies using Amazon Web Services waste more than $10 billion annually. It’s easy to ask, “why don’t they just reduce their spending?” Well, it’s because there’s more to it than that. AWS offers many options — over 200 different services, for example. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides over 300 AWS instance types spread over five unique instance families.

Over the last few years, more organizations have switched from relying solely on one cloud service provider (CSP) to several. The primary reasons for the change are minimizing dependence on a single CSP, preventing vendor lock-in, and providing greater flexibility. Recent trends include using a mix of cloud providers to take advantage of the cost savings several CSPs offer and using best-of-breed services for different applications, teams, or departments.

While AWS offers significant benefits compared to traditional on-premise infrastructure, its inherent elasticity and scalability tend to create uncontrolled costs. AWS costs can be opaque and difficult to analyze, and without a system for identifying the source of costs and managing them, they can quickly undermine profit margins. However, several tools have emerged to help organizations manage and optimize their costs over the past few years.

It’s officially September, and we hope your cloud prices have fall-en. Below, we’ll leaf you with the latest news in the cloud cost world from August of 2024. Here are the highlights: Pour a cup of pumpkin-spiced goodness, and read on for the details.

Also known as application performance monitoring (APM), application monitoring tools track and analyze application performance. They monitor application metrics such as CPU usage, response times, error rates, and uptime. The tools also offer real-time insights to identify issues, improve user experiences, and optimize resources. But are APM tools really necessary?

As both the State Of FinOps 2024 and the State Of Cloud Costs In 2024 indicate, reducing cloud waste remains a top priority for cloud-driven organizations. Cloud spenders care more than ever about cost efficiency — and CloudZero is working tirelessly to make cloud savings simpler. To this end, we’re proud to announce that we’ve added a suite of automated GCP optimizations to our Insights feature.

Creating a positive user experience is always one of the most important goals our teams focus on. Whether it’s administrators working behind the scenes on the platform, or users looking to uncover cost savings opportunities in Explorer, or engineers working with our APIs, we always strive to provide a frictionless experience making sure each person has the right information to achieve their goals in our platform.

Cost management in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be complex. It’s a lot like costs in Azure or AWS. Often, companies don’t know where to begin when they receive 20-page invoices. GCP billing tools can be unfamiliar, especially to users from a different cloud provider. However, the platform continues to simplify its cost monitoring and billing tools.

There are four main cloud delivery models (cloud computing services) and four major cloud deployment models (types of cloud computing). Each model is unique, and that affects how it impacts cloud management, data security, and cost management, among other considerations. Here’s exactly what each cloud computing model provides and how to choose the best option for your needs.