Here at CloudZero, we work with some of the top software-driven companies out there. Like us, they’re building their products on Amazon Web Services (AWS), along with whatever best-of-breed providers meet their needs. It’s no secret that in recent years, Snowflake has seen — well, some serious success. For many companies, including CloudZero, they're the data warehouse provider of choice — and an essential component of delivering their products.

The benefits for innovation with Kubernetes are clear: it can allow small teams to deliver more value, more rapidly. However, cost discussions around Kubernetes — and Kubernetes cost management — can be difficult. You have disposable and replaceable compute resources constantly coming and going, on a range of types of infrastructure. Yet at the end of the month, you just get a billing line item for EKS cost and a bunch of EC2 instances.

As companies are increasingly built in the cloud, cost management has become a major issue for many engineering teams. While cloud providers like AWS offer flexibility and easy scaling, cloud costs can be opaque and difficult to track. As a result, many companies that rely on the cloud are adopting cloud cost management strategies to understand and manage the charges associated with their cloud-based technology, and maximize cloud usage and efficiency.

For developers and programmers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many benefits. It gives you access to the computing and DevOps tools you need at the press of a button — which helps you get products out the door fast. However, it can be challenging to control your costs and identify waste. In this comprehensive guide, we will examine some practical steps you can take for AWS cost optimization.

One of the many aspects of CloudZero’s cloud cost intelligence is anomaly detection. Unlike solutions which require you to set budgets or thresholds, CloudZero uses machine learning to automatically detect and alert on anomalies, then send them directly to dev team Slack channels where the responsible engineers can view and take action. Here are just a few examples of real customer anomalies, what caused them, and the action the customer took.

Earlier this year, Gartner published a report called “How to Manage and Optimize Costs of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS.” Overall, we agreed with the piece and wrote a blog post about what they get right (and where they miss). However, one thing that stood out to us is how many aspects of optimization Gartner described as very difficult — which CloudZero can help make easier.

Earlier this year, Gartner published “How to Manage and Optimize Costs of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS,” by analysts Marco Meinardi and Traverse Clayton. As a company that is focused on enabling engineering teams with cloud cost intelligence, we were of course curious what they had to say. Now, if you are familiar with Gartner, you know they have a reputation for serving enterprise clients, so they can sometimes be — well, enterprisey.

Blameless Incident Management is a tool for managing production incidents. However, it can support many different use cases due to its flexibility. Here at Blameless, we try to “dogfood” our product as much as possible. So we’ve taken to using the IM feature for many other aspects of our daily work, not just system outages. One use case that I’m particularly fond of is using the tool to drive alignment and collaboration around long-term infrastructure projects.

Multi-tenancy is one of the key properties of any effective SaaS solution. It gives companies the economies of scale, elasticity, and operational efficiency to offer competitive products with strong margins. However, multi-tenancy has a tradeoff: cost visibility. Because customers share AWS resources in multi-tenant architecture, the billing data shows the resources you’ve utilized, but not by who or to do what. It’s possible to build this kind of visibility in.

To allocate costs or maximize savings? That’s the question many AWS customers will have to answer when formulating their FinOps strategy relating to Savings Plans. If part of your daily routine is finding ways to cut cloud costs, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Appropriate chargeback reporting is an undeniable necessity for any business, but in this world of uncontrolled rising cloud costs, so is capitalizing on any savings opportunities!