When you work in tech, there are certain truths about the holiday season you can always count on. For example, you’ll be holding your breath up until New Years waiting to see if deals will come across the line. The end-of-year planning you intended to have done by December 31, will inevitably bleed into January. And, without a doubt, you’ll spend your holidays trying to explain to your relatives what exactly it is that you do.

Since the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) company entered the market in 1999, Salesforce, the industry has exploded. Experts are predicting that the industry will exceed $600 billion by 2023 at an 18% compound annual growth rate. In order to play in this highly competitive space, SaaS companies need to have a deep understanding of their financial key performance indicators (KPIs).

Identifying the best payment plan for cloud services can be a challenge. For one thing, no two businesses are exactly alike. Since each organization faces a unique set of circumstances, it is tough to choose the best option from all the different cloud cost models without taking an in-depth look at business-specific aspects such as demand, spending preferences, and projected revenue over the next few years. On top of that, the payment plans themselves are very often confusing.

If IT Financial Management (ITFM) was as simple as widely presumed, we’d be seeing IT expenditure dropping globally with the continued adoption of cloud services. For example, in 2020 it was expected that 83% of enterprise workloads would move to the cloud. That move happened but the results didn’t come with the extensive cost reduction benefits that businesses envisioned. Organizations are actually spending more despite the workload migration.

Organizations of all sizes can take advantage of Amazon Web Service’s cloud computing. AWS provides low-cost cloud storage, nearly unlimited compute resources, and secure remote computing services. Still, many users find AWS confusing. Companies often struggle to understand AWS billing. Aligning cloud spend to actual operational activities for cost allocation is next to impossible. AWS also limits the amount of compute resources you can use based on your location.

Author Jeff Duntemann said a good tool improves how you work, whereas a great tool transforms your thinking. Companies that want to improve their cloud-based operations can rely on cloud metrics as an effective tool for transforming their cloud operations. You can't fix what you don't measure. Cloud metrics are the logs of data that a cloud infrastructure or application generates.

Although refactoring isn’t typically listed as one of the core phases of the software development lifecycle, you cannot leave it out if you intend to keep code running efficiently. The unfortunate thing about software is, it doesn’t usually age very well. Even seemingly perfect source code progressively decays over time — due to the ever-morphing tech ecosystem.

A fundamental requirement for building a profitable product is finding ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency. When you’re operating in the cloud, it’s almost impossible to gain this insight without data. This is where data-driven software development comes in. Data-driven development is a software engineering approach that relies on data to guide the development process.

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.

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.