Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AWS Cost Explorer is one of the core pillars of AWS cloud financial management. It helps collect resource consumption data and associated cost information across multiple AWS services. Cost Explorer then helps visualize all of this data in one dashboard to ease cost management. You can then analyze, understand, and share cloud cost data with various parties. Cost Explorer is also ideal for companies that have simple cloud billing — and it's free with an AWS subscription.

Early on in our journey as a company, CloudZero split with legacy data architecture, migrating to Snowflake and opening up a world of resource flexibility. With the centralized, limitless processing power that Snowflake provided, our team could focus more energy on value-added work, less on managing inefficiencies. With a rapidly expanding customer base, Snowflake allowed us to maintain peak velocity, scaling without running into storage-based slowdowns.

The FinOps position, for most SaaS companies, is a relatively recent addition to the team. FinOps acts as a liaison between the Finance and Engineering teams, with the goal of getting everyone on the same page (and speaking the same language) when it comes to setting, optimizing, and sticking to budgets. FinOps and engineering have a special relationship, because engineers are the ones who ultimately make major infrastructure, development, and design choices that impact the cloud bill.

Cloud computing offers nearly limitless capacity on-demand, but left unmanaged, that flexibility can lead to surprisingly high monthly cloud bills. To be fair, rising cloud costs aren't always a bad thing; they could be a signal of growth. For example, you’ll incur higher costs as you gain more customers. Your costs of goods sold (COGS) may also increase. These scenarios are often a good thing unless your margins on COGS are thinning out.

Containers are one of the most popular ways for businesses to deploy applications. They provide an easy method of packaging applications into self-sufficient units that can be used, moved around, and re-used in any number of ways without breaking the overall functionality of your software. With the possible exception of serverless architecture, containerization is perhaps the best way to achieve smooth, seamless application deployment and minimal hassle with updates and application maintenance.

What separates an engineer fresh out of university from one who has been working in the field for several years? While specialized coding knowledge certainly plays a part, it’s the softer, more business-oriented skills that often set engineers apart from the pack. If an employee doesn’t take the time to develop skills for business in the engineering field, it could hinder their career growth over the long term.

A software development life cycle (SDLC) is the sequence of steps a software project moves from conception to completion. The SDLC process specifies how to build, test, maintain, and improve specific software. Modern software development life cycles typically involve five to seven stages, depending on the model you use. Today, the SDLC comprises eight major models, from the traditional Waterfall approach to the ultra-modern Spiral Model.

The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) wants to increase transparency on a company’s carbon footprint, which ultimately would impact valuations. In late March, the SEC released a proposed rule that would force companies to release climate-related disclosures, including information about their carbon footprint and their risk exposure. The goal is to add tangible value to the impact and risks of climate on a company’s operations.

When I co-founded CloudZero, I set out to change the way the world thinks about cloud cost optimization and management. For too long, I had watched cloud cost optimization vendors neglect to help companies build better, more cost-effective software. Instead, everything focused on buying better, by optimizing prices and discounts.

While Financial Operations (FinOps) isn’t a new concept, it is becoming more prevalent in companies that have started seeing increases in their cloud spend. Historically, when engineers needed to set up infrastructure to complete a project, they had to go through a long process of procuring servers, finding space in a data center, and getting financial approval. This process could take two months or more, so it allowed plenty of time for oversight by the financial department.