Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In case you don't know the back story, in order for me to play with radios and label it "work," I've created a PostgreSQL database running on AWS Aurora. The db is fed from API calls to aprs.fi through Lambda functions on AWS. Some of the DDL & code is mine. Some is from Claude. Neither of us paid much attention to indexing when we were putting things together.

We hear a lot of war stories from the teams we work with. Horror stories about cloud bills, surprise overages, and the infrastructure decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. This one comes from Erik Dasque, CTO at Allure Security. It involves a junior developer, a Kubernetes CronJob, and a recurring bill that, if not caught, would have happened on a yearly basis.

Not long ago, cloud cost was an engineering problem. FinOps teams owned it, finance leaned in occasionally, and everyone else stayed out of it. Now, that’s changed. AI changed who has skin in the game. CFOs get asked about it in board meetings. CEOs field questions on earnings calls. The audience for cloud cost management has exploded — and that means the conversation CloudZero is built to enable isn’t only a technical one, it’s a business one.

JC, the Director of Software Engineering, Cloud at LogicMonitor, shares how Cost Optimization enabled his team to shift to Cost-Intelligent Observability and tackle an unexpected and growing cloud bill. As engineers, we live and breathe performance. We obsess over latency, reliability, and uptime, the hallmarks of a healthy system. But there’s another metric that’s becoming just as critical: cost.

Back in May of 2021, containers had already won. Kubernetes adoption was surging. ECS and EKS were powerful. But for many teams, deploying a simple containerized web service still meant stitching together clusters, networking rules, scaling policies, load balancers, IAM roles, and CI/CD pipelines. It felt heavier than it should. Developers no longer wanted more orchestration power. They wanted less operational drag.

To watch the full walkthrough video on the Pepperdata self-service install, click the link here. Many organizations struggle to efficiently manage their cloud costs, and that arises from difficulties in managing Kubernetes resources. Of the $419 billion spent on cloud infrastructure in 2025 (Synergy Research Group), Flexera estimates that 27% of all of cloud spend is wasted due to overprovisioned resources.

At a certain point, faster delivery stops feeling like progress and starts feeling like risk. When engineering teams scale from 10 to 50+ developers, the volume of infrastructure changes, database schemas, environment variables, and networking rules, no longer grows linearly. It scales exponentially. This is the scaling inflection point where manual governance breaks.

In today's cloud-native environments, managing resource waste and optimizing costs can feel like a constant battle. Operators, along with their fearless FinOps teams, spend countless hours hunting down unused resources, deciphering complex telemetry data, and manually implementing code or configuration changes to try to reduce cloud costs. But what if you could automate the entire process, from identifying waste to implementing the fix, all based on actual production telemetry?

Like most SaaS companies, CloudZero uses its own product. When we released cost per customer reporting, we tested it on ourselves first. And today, we use cost per customer reports regularly. Why? Because they help leadership answer board and renewal questions, including customer-level margins. Cost per customer is valuable and hard to get right. Multi-tenant systems and Kubernetes can hide the link between shared infrastructure (like EC2) and the customers using it.