At CloudZero, we advocate measuring every cloud cost metric that makes the most sense for your business. When you know your company’s unit economics inside and out, you can better inform each department, show them how to make smart decisions based on the information, and ultimately maintain control over your margins. One of the most universally useful metrics to track is cloud cost per customer.

You know this already. Regardless of your size, you must keep up with technological developments in your industry — and, increasingly, in other industries, even those that seem unrelated. Embracing disruption can enable you to increase your market share, revenue, and profit margins. Delegating some development and operations responsibilities to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) experts allows developers to innovate and create new solutions faster.

A big part of cloud management is managing and optimizing cloud costs. CloudHealth and CloudCheckr aim to help you manage the cost, performance, security, and compliance requirements of your cloud-based services. Both offer hybrid and multi-cloud deployment capabilities. But we doubt you'll want to use them both simultaneously. So, which one do you choose? CloudCheckr or CloudHealth? In this comparison, we reveal what makes each cloud management tool unique, so you can pick the right one for your needs.

When it comes to cloud costs, engineers have a particular reputation. The executive suite and finance department often share perplexing frustration about why engineers appear not to care about budgets and costs at all. They provide hard budget limits, yet engineers frequently surpass them, citing performance and user experience as reasons for the excess spending.

Did you know that Google Search changes how it works about 12 times daily? For example, the internet search giant made about 4,500 changes to Search in 2020 alone. Those changes involved running more than 600,000 tests. Most of us can barely tell how often Google updates because the modifications are subtle. But we can tell that something keeps improving. Many other leading tech solutions do the same, from your tiniest mobile app to big ol’ Apple products.

Kubecost and Cast AI promise real-time Kubernetes cost monitoring. Both deliver this to a good extent. For example, Kubecost provides cost data from within and outside a K8s cluster. It also shares the data in a granular format, such as cost by Kubernetes concepts like namespaces, pods, and custom labels. Cast.ai offers several similar capabilities, including cost savings recommendations, and is currently available for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and on-prem Kubernetes.

In the SaaS world, it’s an accepted fact that engineering teams care most about performance, while finance teams primarily care about costs. The rift between the two teams is so large it caused the birth of a whole new SaaS company department — FinOps — to help them work together. This division of goals often leads executives to wonder which path the company should take.

Kubernetes (K8s) adoption has exploded over the past few years. But it hasn't been easy to monitor, manage, and optimize K8s costs. To provide greater cost visibility into Kubernetes clusters and environments, Kubecost launched in 2019 while OpenCost debuted in 2022. OpenCost has several founding contributors. But it is Kubecost that developed the cost allocation engine that the OpenCost implementation uses. Kubecost also announced the launch of OpenCost on June 2, 2022.

Cloud waste has been costing companies billions of dollars for years now. In 2022, organizations spent roughly $490 billion on the cloud. Common estimates suggest that about 30% of cloud spend is wasted, meaning a whopping $147 billion of waste — the most in any year, ever. Organizations are set to spend nearly $600 billion on the cloud in 2023. Could you be wasting money trying to save money? Fortunately, cloud waste is preventable in most cases.

New Relic provides full-stack observability and monitoring. It provides almost every type of system monitoring under one platform. This includes monitoring tools for infrastructure, application performance monitoring (APM), synthetics, user, log, mobile, network, and Kubernetes components. DevOps, security, and business professionals use these capabilities to detect anomalies, analyze root causes, and fix software performance issues.