Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I am a big proponent of cross-functional alignment, as I remnded our ELT at a recent off-site meeting. There’s a lot of buzz about FinOps bringing financial accountability to cloud spend by eliminating procurement siloes and implementing cross-functional best practices. As the CFO of a SaaS company, I fully support this practice. In fact, Virtana recently made some changes to our cloud infrastructure as part of our own evolution.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources without direct active management by the user. Instead, the delivery of said resources is available over the internet, which has made cloud computing a popular digital service that various industries use to operate and manage work tasks. How cloud computing services are implemented, hosted and accessed by users is called cloud deployment. There are different types of deployments, each with defined advantages for users.

Congratulations, you’ve been tasked with moving your workload to somebody else’s building! The “cloud” is just that: someone else’s data center. But their data center is pretty impressive (so there’s that). And, yes, while there are a million options available to you in AWS and Azure…a plethora of IT goodies, most of us will not use any of those bells and whistles, at least initially. We have to get there first—your basic lift and shift.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore the rise of DaaS services across organizations, and the role it could play in the hybrid workplace of tomorrow. When we last wrote about the era of Everything as a service (XaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS) was still a relatively niche concept.

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is a collection of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools developed by Google. Today, millions of teams use Google Workspace (e.g., Gmail, Drive, Hangouts) to streamline their workflows. Monitoring Google Workspace activity is an essential part of security monitoring and audits, especially if these applications have become tightly integrated with your organization’s data.

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.

In this article we’ll go through the ins and outs of AWS Lambda pricing model, how it works, what additional charges you might be looking at and what’s in the fine print. Money makes the wold go round. Unfortunately, it is a necessity in almost all spheres of life. You can live without it or with lesser amounts of it, but it makes it all harder. If you wish to have it, first, you need to give it, as always. Even AWS Lambda is not free.