June was a hot month — both in terms of the temperature in North America and because of the FinOps news that has been rolling down the pipeline! (Around here, there’s always excitement in the air when a major FinOps event goes off without a hitch.)

In today's competitive and uncertain tech landscape, engineering organizations are constantly seeking ways to optimize costs without compromising on performance. Efficient resource management and cost reduction have become crucial for businesses aiming to stay alive and ahead. At Cycle, our goal is to offer a robust solution that enhances efficiency while delivering significant cost savings to our users.

In the last few years, many businesses have migrated much of their operations to the cloud, and with increased usage, the complexity of managing cloud costs and achieving operational efficiency has grown as well. In many cases, cloud usage is outpacing the capabilities or availability of DevOps and FinOps teams to effectively manage a larger, more complex cloud infrastructure, so cloud optimization solutions are becoming the lifeline to maintaining reliable and cost-efficient operations.

Optimization is key to achieving cost efficiency and stability for cloud environments. One optimization factor to consider is deciding which availability zones (AZ) to operate in. Location can impact cloud operations availability, performance, and cost. However, it can be a daunting task to look for the most suitable and cost-efficient AZs. There are two key challenges.

In recent years, cloud financial management has evolved beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. The overwhelm has led too many companies to struggle to accurately monitor, allocate, and optimize their cloud costs. This issue cost companies about 30% of their cloud budgets in 2022 alone, according to Gartner. With FinOps, you can prevent this bleeding without sacrificing innovation. Yet, taking a manual approach to FinOps can be inefficient and error-prone.

According to Amazon, EC2 Spot Instances can save you up to 90% of your spending on On-Demand Instances. It’s been proven that Reserved EC2 instances are cheaper than On-Demand ones. But, Spot Instances can offer even bigger discounts. Despite these cost benefits, Spot Instances have many caveats that make them unsuitable for some operations and processes. Even Amazon emphasizes this. Although this EC2 can save you a lot of money, some situations are best for On-Demand or Reserved Instances.

Kubernetes is now much past a hyped-up buzzword and has become nearly the de facto platform for microservices, enabling the flexibility and scalability modern engineering organizations require. It’s no surprise then that many organizations still running on legacy platforms are exploring how to migrate to cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes.

The age of information technology has rapidly expanded to include a wide range of necessary roles to manage and optimize operational frameworks. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), Development Operations (DevOps), and Platform Engineers have become invaluable within this digital landscape. Here, you’ll learn more about each role, how they differ, and what they bring to the table.

Incidents are unavoidable in software development and IT. As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), one of the tools you’ll use frequently is an incident timeline. The incident timeline provides a real-time report on any incident, including alerts, system updates, issue severity changes, manual chat entries, and more.