Breakthroughs in engineering best practices often stem from a handful of top tech companies. Many of them share their behind-the-scenes stories at conferences, in blogs, and slide decks — or open source code. These companies invest millions of dollars and dedicated headcount in optimizing everything from uptime to engineering velocity — so why wouldn’t you look to them for inspiration?

Financial planning and analysis is becoming an increasingly strategic part of a SaaS organization. The role of finance is no longer about just taking inputs and calculating how they affect financial plans, but about driving business outcomes through effective financial planning. There is a popular Andreessen Horowitz article titled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” that showcases best practices compared to worst practices.

Tagging, as a means of organizing our cloud environments, has utterly, totally, failed us. If you have authored a tagging policy document, begged your engineers to properly tag their stuff, or just plain given up, then you know what I'm talking about. Tagging is broken, and I don't mean broken in a way that can be fixed, but rather that the entire concept just isn't getting the job done.

Few practices exemplify the impact of DevOps more than Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Anyone who remembers hearing “I don’t know why it’s not working; it worked on my machine …” can vouch for this! IaC provides a standard way to create declarative descriptions of infrastructure to represent desired environment states — essentially allowing teams to manage IT infrastructure using configuration files.

As companies migrate to the cloud, they often overlook costs, instead focusing on innovation, speed, and flexibility. They assume the cloud is inherently cost-effective and less costly than on-premise infrastructure. As they expand their cloud operations, though, organizations soon realize that the same things that make the cloud alluring and extensively flexible, can also potentially push usage bills way beyond budget. Companies can struggle to find a balance between innovation and rising cloud costs.

As cloud adoption continues to increase, organizations are recognizing the need for cloud operations. CloudOps, as it’s often called, has become the industry standard for cloud-powered enterprises that intend to get the most out of their cloud services. Previously, it was common for organizations to rush into cloud adoption, with IT operations handling cloud installation, management, and maintenance tasks. The cloud, at the time, was considered to be a complementary extension of on-premise systems.

Many organizations are considering migrating to Kubernetes, and while it certainly has advantages, it’s not for everyone. In this article, we’ll explain why you might use Kubernetes, what you should ask yourself before embarking on a Kubernetes migration, and tips to keep in mind as you make the switch.

A variance analysis report is used to measure actual performance against your budgeted or planned performance. From a finance perspective, it’s essentially a way to measure your organization’s planning effectiveness. While there are a number of reasons you might be surprised by your variance analysis, it can be a signal that something went wrong along the way and you have not been collaborating with your team, are using the wrong tools, or have ineffective processes.

For many organizations, cloud costs are a mystery. Beyond knowing their total cloud spend, businesses have little insight into the biggest drivers of their costs, let alone how they can better manage their cloud investment. With on-premise infrastructure, organizations have a predictable understanding of their costs, but the same cannot be said for the cloud.