Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You're paying Apple $0.99 to $59.99 a month for iCloud+ storage. Maybe you're about to. Either way, you're probably wondering if the pricing is fair, what you actually get at each tier, and whether there's a better option. The pricing is fine. The encryption? Not so much. Apple holds the keys to most of your files by default, which means they can access them if a government asks or if their servers get breached.

What do 475 senior leaders across software, financial services, cybersecurity, and other industries all have in common? They have little to no idea whether their AI investments are paying off. CloudZero just released FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, a report assessing the state of cloud and AI spending. Culled from hundreds of responses from people directly accountable for cloud spending, the report shows that while FinOps maturity is accelerating, cloud efficiency is plummeting.

Whoever thought we’d see the day when cloud cost management (CCM) seemed easy? CloudZero just released FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, an annual report on the state of cloud and AI costs. The report surfaced what looks like a paradox: FinOps maturity is accelerating, but organizational cloud efficiency is plummeting. 72% of organizations now have formal cloud cost management (CCM) programs. That’s nearly double what we saw in our last survey (39%).

Q: What do you call it when FinOps maturity surges but cloud efficiency plummets? A: An AI-nigma. I don’t claim to be a comedian. But I do claim to be Fred FinOps, so the paradoxical findings from CloudZero’s new report titled FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, created in partnership with B2B SaaS benchmarking firm Benchmarkit, had me scratching my head. The good news: These numbers tell a story of cloud cost maturity and control. But then there’s the bad news.

According to our new report, FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, 40% of companies now spend $10M or more annually on AI. Most can’t tell you if it’s working. That’s not a budgeting problem. It’s a systems problem. And Donella Meadows wrote the playbook for understanding it.

The decision to migrate a production application is rarely about the destination. It is about the friction of the journey. For most engineering leaders, the word "migration" is a synonym for "refactor." The industry has conditioned us to assume that moving to a modern cloud platform requires throwing away years of stable configuration, learning a new proprietary DSL, and rewriting core application logic to fit a specific container or serverless model.

In a recent technical evaluation by Journal du Net (JDN), Upsun (formerly Platform.sh) was recognized for its ability to "pull ahead" (tire son épingle du jeu) in a fiercely competitive market dominated by cloud giants and specialized pure players. While hyperscalers offer raw power, Upsun’s strategic fusion of enterprise reliability and AI-ready agility has redefined expectations for modern PaaS.

If you’re looking for a dashboarding solution today, chances are you’ve looked at Grafana or SquaredUp — or both. Grafana is a popular open source dashboarding tool with on-prem and cloud variants, while SquaredUp is the SaaS, cloud-based unified dashboarding solution. Both offer a comprehensive list of data sources that they can plug into and build dashboards. As such, they both also offer an integration with Azure - which is the focus of our discussion today.