Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Testing database-driven applications is notoriously painful. If your app depends on MySQL, you’ve probably spent hours setting up local databases, running migrations, loading data, and then cleaning everything up just to rerun your tests. This repetitive cycle slows development, breaks pipelines, and introduces inconsistency between local and production environments.

Gartner recognizes Last9 in their latest Cool Vendor report for unified telemetry and agentic SDK—moving teams from reactive monitoring to proactive ops. Founder at Last9. Loves building dev tools and listening to The Beatles.

The IT landscape in enterprises today is complex, hybrid and dynamic and the complexity is also increasing rapidly due to increased containerization, microservice-based apps, and the overall scale of digital operations.

When CloudZero’s CTO Erik Peterson joined the FinOps Weekly podcast in October 2025, he didn’t hold back. Instead of going on about the usual best practices of AI cost optimization, he posed challenges to how we approach AI spending. From “zombie AI experiments” eating your budget to why you should stop apologizing for using AI, these 10 insights from the podcast are worth considering in how we approach AI FinOps. (Watch the full podcast below and keep reading for more!)