Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You're not alone if you have trouble visualizing, measuring, and controlling your IT costs. Whether public or private, cloud computing can add to the cost problem. That’s because cloud computing offers on-demand resources, so misconfigured infrastructure, an overzealous engineer, or a blindsided operations team can do something that leads to a surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. But not so fast. What is cost optimization, and why is it different from IT cost reduction?

Organizations receive high monthly bills from cloud providers with no way of determining why the number changes from month to month or how to accurately predict future spend. More importantly, there is little information to provide visibility if cloud resources are being deployed efficiently or if spend is correlated to business performance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides three types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances; On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances (RIs), and Spot Instances. EC2 On-Demand instances are the default and most expensive instances. RIs and Spot instances offer discounts of up to 72% and 90% on On-Demand instances, respectively. The Reserved Instances are long-term commitments that guarantee you compute power for a year or three. Spot instances fluctuate in price and availability constantly.

More enterprises are adopting cloud computing to ensure that they can accelerate innovation, stay competitive, and enjoy cost savings. This trend has only increased in the last two years with the rise of remote work necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the rise of cloud adoption, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments are increasing in popularity as well. According to a Gartner survey, 81% of survey respondents are using two or more cloud providers.

Armed with a Ph.D. from UC San Diego, our guest started off with internships at Google and Microsoft before gaining valuable experience as a VP and a highly sought-after consultant for startups and SMBs. Now he’s one of the world’s foremost experts on wrangling vast data sets and maximizing efficiency.

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.