Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Every day, CloudZero helps SaaS companies understand their cloud environments and take consistent steps forward on the journey to cloud cost maturity. We discuss this a lot on our blog. What we talk about far less frequently is our own journey. One of the reasons CloudZero can help other businesses grow, change, and adapt is because we know what it’s like to shift strategies and try new things that are a little bit scary or unknown.

Migrating your on-prem applications to Azure can help you improve scalability, reliability, and security. It can also help reduce costs and free your engineering teams to focus on innovation and performance optimization. But it can be hard to understand Azure costs as they evolve during your migration and to see how they correlate with your resource utilization once you’re up and running in Azure.

The cloud holds such promise. It’s the promise of near-infinite scalability, power, and growth potential. Companies switching to the cloud, especially in the early days of the 2010s, were seduced by the possibilities of what could happen if they just spent a little more, raced against their competitors a little faster, or achieved just a bit more product functionality. Could they be the next Twitter? The next Uber? Or something even bigger and better than what had come before?

No matter how complicated your monthly cloud bill, all spend in the cloud is premised on a very simple formula.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud storage platform that provides highly scalable, low-latency, and relatively affordable cloud storage. Plus, developers can use S3 to save, archive, and retrieve data anywhere on the web at any time with a user-friendly web interface. Amazon S3 is a simple key-based object store you can use to store any type of data, structured or unstructured.

It’s a fact of life within the SaaS world that some features will perform better or worse than others in terms of costs versus revenue. If it were possible to develop every single new release in a way that it would flawlessly maintain desired profit margins, everyone would be doing it. What separates the major players from companies that struggle year after year is how they monitor and respond to changing circumstances as they arise, and whether they learn from past mistakes.