Businesses both small and large use cloud services to help maintain their data. But managing cloud services — and making sure you stay within your budget — can be a challenge. To maximize your money, you need to focus on one thing: efficiency. If you can be efficient with your time and finances, getting your cloud services up and running will be a breeze.

Cloud costs are a daily concern for companies running applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This makes sense because many organizations struggle with unexpected AWS charges. Although many organizations have a cloud budget in place, accurately controlling costs is difficult. Real-time cost remediation is often difficult for many, leading to inflated AWS costs every billing cycle. No matter where you are on your cloud journey, reducing AWS costs is something you’ll want to do continuously.

Here at Pepperdata, we put a premium on individuals whose skills and experience can help us reach our goals. We believe our team is composed of the best people in their respective fields. Our “Pepperdata Profiles” series gives a spotlight on our gifted individuals and allows us to highlight our employees’ experiences.

When your organization uses the cutting edge of technology to function, you may feel like it takes all your time and energy to stay on top of emerging trends. How are you supposed to anticipate what the future will hold when you have to balance those considerations with how to best provide for your customers’ needs today? It’s okay if you don’t have your finger on the pulse 100 percent of the time.

For SaaS companies, the cloud plays a significant role in product creation and delivery. As one of the top drivers of COGS, cloud costs have a major impact on key financial metrics and can dramatically impact revenue and valuation. However, that creates a scenario ripe for conflict: Engineers make important decisions about features and functionality without clear insight into how those decisions will impact spending—and finance continuously gets surprised by seemingly exorbitant cloud bills.

With our recent announcement regarding the general availability of Ocean for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), I decided to migrate one of our production services. The service was already running on AKS, but will now be managed by Spot’s Ocean for AKS. TL;DR: The results are pretty cool, as I was able to cut 82% out of the existing spending for this AKS cluster. You can see the results in the screen capture below.

While modernizing IT infrastructure, securing data, and ensuring high availability are high priorities, optimizing AWS costs and utilization has consistently been the top priority for most companies in recent years. As a result, AWS introduced Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). AWS designed CUR to provide granular data on resource consumption and associated costs in the AWS environment.

Ocean automates cloud infrastructure for containers. It continuously analyzes how your containers are using infrastructure, automatically scaling compute resources to maximize utilization without sacrificing availability. Ocean shuffles workloads and then scales down underutilized nodes to ensure everything runs at the lowest cost.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is fast becoming an essential aspect of modern IT operations, particularly in highly scaled, big data environments. As businesses and industries shift to the digital and embrace new IT infrastructures and technologies to remain operational and competitive, the need for a new approach for IT teams to find and manage the balance between launching new systems and features and ensuring these are intuitive, reliable, and friendly for end users has intensified as well.

Investors have fallen back in love with profitability. This followed an almost two decade love affair with top-line revenue growth. The growth-at-all-costs paradigm enabled what I call cost-agnostic innovation: If it brings in more customers and revenue, build it — no matter how much it costs. When cash is abundant, investors can afford long-term risk, and cost-agnostic innovation works.