Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Whether you’re a product manager, a marketing organization, or in finance, you’re probably using the cloud in some way. But many businesses are still immature when it comes to building systems in the cloud, especially when it comes to how they use their financial resources. Here, CloudZero founder and CTO Erik Peterson breaks down the responsibility of using the cloud, how to break down the costs of cloud computing, and what you need to do to change the conversation from cost to profit.

One of the best ways to achieve efficient product development is to make sure everyone involved with a project is on the same page, working toward the same ultimate goals. However, this is harder to do than it sounds. Engineering and product teams bring very different priorities to the table, and establishing which priorities to focus on first often becomes a matter of debate.

Companies of all sizes can take advantage of AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) to save money on the price of standard Amazon EC2 On-Demand instances. To receive the discounted rate associated with AWS Reserved Instances, you must commit to a year or three years of usage. In exchange, you can save up to 75% off the On-Demand price.

When each quarter’s financial report lands on the desks of a company’s C-Suite executives, those execs are essentially looking at a black box of spending and revenue. They can see the total numbers and the growth or shrinkage of certain categories, but they ultimately have very little context into why each number is as high or low as it is. Without this context, it’s all too easy to feel sticker shock over a seemingly outrageous cloud bill and demand that costs be cut at once.

AWS Cost Explorer is one of the core pillars of AWS cloud financial management. It helps collect resource consumption data and associated cost information across multiple AWS services. Cost Explorer then helps visualize all of this data in one dashboard to ease cost management. You can then analyze, understand, and share cloud cost data with various parties. Cost Explorer is also ideal for companies that have simple cloud billing — and it's free with an AWS subscription.

Early on in our journey as a company, CloudZero split with legacy data architecture, migrating to Snowflake and opening up a world of resource flexibility. With the centralized, limitless processing power that Snowflake provided, our team could focus more energy on value-added work, less on managing inefficiencies. With a rapidly expanding customer base, Snowflake allowed us to maintain peak velocity, scaling without running into storage-based slowdowns.

The FinOps position, for most SaaS companies, is a relatively recent addition to the team. FinOps acts as a liaison between the Finance and Engineering teams, with the goal of getting everyone on the same page (and speaking the same language) when it comes to setting, optimizing, and sticking to budgets. FinOps and engineering have a special relationship, because engineers are the ones who ultimately make major infrastructure, development, and design choices that impact the cloud bill.

Cloud computing offers nearly limitless capacity on-demand, but left unmanaged, that flexibility can lead to surprisingly high monthly cloud bills. To be fair, rising cloud costs aren't always a bad thing; they could be a signal of growth. For example, you’ll incur higher costs as you gain more customers. Your costs of goods sold (COGS) may also increase. These scenarios are often a good thing unless your margins on COGS are thinning out.