Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the next few years, the cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3%. Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular among businesses of all sizes, contributing to the market’s growth. When you consider the other benefits involved, that makes a lot of sense for business.

You’re probably familiar with finding surprise, hidden charges if you’ve been using the cloud for a while. Data transfer fees are the most common source of unanticipated Amazon Web Services (AWS) charges. They can be so costly that some companies, like Netflix and Pinterest, have spent fortunes on data transfer fees — up to $30 million a year. In this post, we’ll share tips for navigating AWS data transfer pricing and how you can optimize costs.

One tracks what happened, who did it, and when it happened. The other monitors how your systems are performing so you can see why and do something about it. Knowing the difference between CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch isn’t just helpful for engineers. It’s essential for finance and leadership teams, too. That’s because the two services can quietly rack up costs in the background.

Microsoft Azure offers over 150 cloud services across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. But for many teams, it can be expensive, complex, and hard to tailor to specific needs. If the platform feels like overkill or just isn’t the right fit, this guide covers the best Azure alternatives — and what makes each one worth considering.

If you are fine using a conventional cloud cost management tool, Apptio’s Cloudability can be a helpful tool. It promises to enable DevOps, IT, and finance to optimize cloud resources for quality, speed, and cost. A large business with a high cloud spend, a team of 5-10 engineers, and a budget for expert guidance is an ideal match for Cloudability.

Managing AWS costs just a whole lot more convenient. CloudZero now integrates with Amazon Q Developer, AWS’s AI-powered engineering assistant. A natural language processor, Amazon Q Developer helps engineers write, analyze, and debug code, accelerate workload transformations, and adopt AWS best practices, enhancing developer productivity by as much as 80%.

Logging and auditing activity across your AWS environment is a must for security, governance, and compliance. Yet, between management events, data events, and optional insights, it’s easy to overspend on tracking activity without realizing it. In this guide, we’ll break down CloudTrail pricing in plain terms and see what impacts your final bill. We’ll also share immediately actionable ways to keep your CloudTrail costs in check without sacrificing full observability.

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.

Over the last few years, Google Cloud has grown at the fastest rate of any cloud service provider today. From 2020 to 2021, Google Cloud’s IaaS offering, GCP, grew 64%, followed by Microsoft Azure (51%) and Alibaba Cloud (42%), according to Gartner. Yet Google Cloud isn’t flawless. Here’s what we mean and some of the top Google Cloud alternatives you’ll want to consider today.

Databricks is a critical part of many organizations’ tech stacks, facilitating analytics, machine learning, and other leading-edge data engineering tasks. But when a service like Databricks becomes essential, it also tends to become a cost black hole, leading engineering teams to a quandary: How can you keep Databricks costs in check without hurting application performance? At CloudZero, we give organizations unparalleled visibility into their Databricks costs.