As a cloud cost intelligence platform, we spend nearly every day talking to companies about their cloud cost — and there’s something we’ve noticed — people don’t generally have the warm and fuzzies for their cloud cost management tools. You know, the ones that have been around for a while, that you use to build reports about your cloud spend? We won’t refer to them by name. These popular tools have really given the whole category a bit of a bad rap.

The rise of public cloud services has enabled businesses to innovate faster, scale effortlessly, and adopt more advanced technologies easier than ever before. However, there’s a dark side to using public cloud services: complexity and cost. Public cloud services can scale to handle almost any workload, but in doing so, they can quickly generate unpredictable costs for your business.

More and more, we see our clients moving their workloads from clunky on-premise data centers to nimble cloud platforms, orchestrated container environments, such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, or a combination of both. The technical aspects of such a migration are typically well-known. Your IT staff does a great job managing these environments: Still, there is one more aspect of managing these environments that is often overlooked — cost.

The pandemic upended business for many or at the very least cast a grim shade of uncertainty, so, as many took to working from home, they also were commissioned with cutting waste. Among the biggest sources of misspend in 2020 – cloud services. And remote work may have actually spurred the problem, as organizations migrate more applications to the cloud to support these workers.

Automation does not only eliminate the mundaneness of performing repetitive tasks, it can also help reduce errors and mistakes. Good cloud infrastructure encourages cloud automation. That should be one of the main motivators of implementing it. As ubiquitous as the idea of cloud computing has become in the last decade, there is still a lot of demystification to be done. People still don't fully understand its potential. Yes, it can save you money and time but how?

One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is that it gives engineering teams the freedom to deploy and iterate applications quickly. Unlike traditional IT environments where engineers require a series of approvals before embarking on projects, in the cloud, engineers can choose from several managed services and deploy them at the click of a button. This means your team can innovate faster and respond quickly to market demands.

Whether you've recently migrated to the cloud, or you've been operating there for awhile now, you've likely realized how challenging it can be to understand exactly where your cloud spend goes and what drives your costs. Using a cloud service provider can offer many benefits, like the ability to easily scale up and down based on need, but unless you're using the right services and tools, your costs can quickly spiral out of control.

The move to cloud computing has been a no-brainer for many enterprise companies. But cloud computing is an expense that, unlike many other operating costs, is largely variable. Many companies — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — choose AWS to help them streamline fragmented processes, reduce costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

Containers and serverless computing are two of the most popular methods for deploying applications. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. To choose the one that’s right for your business, you need to understand the pros and cons of managing your own containers versus using serverless services.

It’s been a great month for exciting insights about the role that engineering must play in driving profitable innovation.