You're not alone if you have trouble visualizing, measuring, and controlling your IT costs. Whether public or private, cloud computing can add to the cost problem. That’s because cloud computing offers on-demand resources, so misconfigured infrastructure, an overzealous engineer, or a blindsided operations team can do something that leads to a surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. But not so fast. What is cost optimization, and why is it different from IT cost reduction?

Organizations receive high monthly bills from cloud providers with no way of determining why the number changes from month to month or how to accurately predict future spend. More importantly, there is little information to provide visibility if cloud resources are being deployed efficiently or if spend is correlated to business performance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides three types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances; On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances (RIs), and Spot Instances. EC2 On-Demand instances are the default and most expensive instances. RIs and Spot instances offer discounts of up to 72% and 90% on On-Demand instances, respectively. The Reserved Instances are long-term commitments that guarantee you compute power for a year or three. Spot instances fluctuate in price and availability constantly.

Today's technology companies need to release quality features quickly and put them in users' hands even quicker. According to the State of DevOps Report, organizations with CI/CD tools deploy 208X more often and have a 106X shorter lead time than organizations without one. You can release software with minimal downtime for your customers when you use robust continuous deployment software.

Armed with a Ph.D. from UC San Diego, our guest started off with internships at Google and Microsoft before gaining valuable experience as a VP and a highly sought-after consultant for startups and SMBs. Now he’s one of the world’s foremost experts on wrangling vast data sets and maximizing efficiency.

More enterprises are adopting cloud computing to ensure that they can accelerate innovation, stay competitive, and enjoy cost savings. This trend has only increased in the last two years with the rise of remote work necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the rise of cloud adoption, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments are increasing in popularity as well. According to a Gartner survey, 81% of survey respondents are using two or more cloud providers.

In the past couple of months, after nearly a decade of huge returns and steady growth, the tech industry has officially slowed down. Companies are tightening their belts — laying off employees, freezing spending, and lowering budgets. If you work in tech right now, it’s likely you’ve felt it.

DevOps helps developers and operators work together to create high-quality software quickly. DevOps is a modern software development philosophy that uses various tools, processes, and people to get ideal results rapidly. As a result, companies that use DevOps satisfy customer needs, achieving a competitive advantage.

Most companies today have a “cloud first” computing strategy. According to Foundry’s April 2022 report outlining their 2022 Cloud Computing research, 92% of businesses globally have moved to the cloud. What’s more, the percentage of companies with most or all of their IT infrastructure in the cloud is expected to leap from 41% today to 63% in the next 18 months. As companies move more workloads onto various cloud platforms, cloud budgets continue to increase.

In part one of this two-part blog post, we began our deep dive into Apache Spark tuning to optimize resources. We looked at what is involved in executor and partition sizing, particularly choosing the number of partitions and choosing an executor size. After establishing some principles of optimization here, we ended by asking an important question: Is it really practical for all applications to be optimized? As our recent State of the Market report helped reveal, the answer is two-sided. The good news?