Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is what production teams see happening. A vertical pod autoscaler recommendation gets applied automatically. Resource requests come down a notch across a namespace. The cost dashboard registers a small cost savings win. A few minutes later, health checks start failing. Pods enter crash loops.

Cloud native cost optimization requires rethinking how you track containers, serverless, and microservices spend. Here's a framework for 2026.

Years back I sat in on a platform evaluation with a customer who spent forty-five minutes of the meeting focusing on one thing: their custom PHP content management system. They had opinions about the CMS. Strong opinions. They had benchmarks, a migration plan, a proof of concept. They had a diagram. They had questions about the deployment pipeline for this CMS that were, for a single application, more thoroughly considered than most organizations' entire infrastructure strategies.

I live in Manchester, England now. I moved here from Texas last summer (which is its own story), but the thing I wasn't prepared for is how the Industrial Revolution isn't history here. It's the city itself. And if you're American like me, you might need to hear this: the Industrial Revolution didn't start in the US. It started here. Manchester is where the modern world was born. You see it everywhere. The old cotton mills converted into apartments.

CloudZero's new AWS Kiro integration puts cost intelligence directly in your agentic IDE. Ask plain-language questions about spend, attribution, and cost-per-serve without leaving your development workflow. We see a similar pattern playing out across engineering teams running agentic development tools: code gets shipped fast, something moves in the cost data, and understanding why still requires leaving your environment entirely.

Notes from a finance leader whose job this is. A few weeks ago, I traveled to Philadelphia for a conversation with a prospective CloudZero customer. We’d been working with the prospect’s engineering team for some weeks, demoing our platform in view of the RFP they’d drawn up. This stage had gone well, and so the next step was talking it over with the prospect’s CFO. We expected a conversation centered around the key criteria in the RFP.

AI has since become an integral part of our lives, whether it’s for work or personal use; we all use AI in some form or another. However, deciding which is the best AI depends on how you want to use it. Whether it's for general questions, coding, deep research, or image creation, we’re lucky enough that there is an AI model available to help you out.