Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We have a term we like to use when we meet CFOs who have just gotten their biggest AWS bill ever: bill shock. Bill shock is when finance suddenly rings the alarm that the bill is “too high” and gets everyone scrambling to explain what they’re spending money on. It often happens when the bill reaches a new milestone (the first million, ten million, or hundred million) or growth trajectory (it doubled in a quarter!?). The problem with bill shock is that it can be highly disruptive.

This post is the third in a series of deeper dive articles discussing DORA metrics. In previous articles, we looked at: The third metric we’ll examine, Change Failure Rate, is a lagging indicator that helps teams and organizations understand the quality of software that has been shipped, providing guidance on what the team can do to improve in the future.

A large U.S.-based insurance provider was experiencing rising database software licensing costs. In order to reduce the software licensing costs, the organization needed to complete a comprehensive infrastructure analysis of over 200 physical servers. 75 percent of these physical servers supported one software application, their database solution. Additionally, the software routinely only utilized between two and four cores, despite having 24 cores on each server.

Nate Lee here, and I’m one of the founders of Speedscale. The founding team’s worked at several observability and testing companies like New Relic, Observe Inc, and iTKO over the last decade. Speedscale traffic replay was borne out of a frustration from reacting to problems (even if they were minor) that could have been prevented with better testing.

Does technology fascinate you? Are you curious about and interested in learning about different software, hardware and devices? If you answered yes to these questions, you should become a system administrator aka sysadmin. A sysadmin is responsible for monitoring and maintaining computer systems in a network or environment that has multiple users. It’s a great time to become a sysadmin now because the technology sector is booming and yet it’s facing a major Skills shortage.

Multi-cloud strategy – the use of multiple private or public clouds – is increasingly becoming the main method companies use to deploy their IT infrastructure. In the next three years, an estimate 64% of companies will rely on multi-cloud as their main deployment model source. Despite the complexities that come from operationalizing it, as we disccussed in The Challenges of Building Multi Cloud, the multiple benefits that come from this deployment model can often make it worth the effort.

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Cycle’s new pricing model! With this new model, we aim to make our pricing far more straightforward and better suited for larger deployments and customers. While our current pricing model solved the needs of our customers for the last few years, we’ve learned enough that it’s now time to make a change. Before talking about the new model, let’s dive into how we got here.