Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When businesses first transition to the cloud, they often prioritize performance and speed above all else. After all, the cloud is an exciting new world full of nearly unlimited resources ripe for the taking. Sooner or later, however, businesses must face the fact that speed and power come at a high financial price, and sometimes their original choices are not sustainable from a cost standpoint.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is steadily gaining steam. Launched in 2008 — just two years after AWS — GCP has taken the bronze medal in public cloud services for years. While it still occupies third place, its market share has steadily expanded: In Q4 2021, GCP owned 9% of the public cloud market, and by Q3 2022, it had jumped to 11%.

DevOps has exploded in popularity since the concept first emerged in 2009. A DevOps approach encompasses both practices and tools that engineers use to build quality software more rapidly. Before DevOps, software development followed a “waterfall” model. Back then, developers would code first, then perform quality assurance (QA) testing, and fix any bugs or errors as necessary.

Alphabet. Netflix. Shopify. Amazon. Meta. Microsoft. These are just a few of the leading tech companies that recently laid off thousands of employees. Slashing jobs, because it is often one of the biggest expenses for tech companies, may seem like a quick fix, but it can be counterproductive, especially when it impacts experienced engineers. So, what are the specific reasons tech companies are cutting jobs? And what are the alternatives to layoffs?

It all started with a simple Slack message. If you need a refresher, gross margin is a business metric that calculates what percentage of revenue you take home as profit. To calculate it, you subtract your costs (often abbreviated as COGS, short for costs of goods sold) from your revenue and divide it by your total revenue, et voilà, gross margin. So, if your annual revenue is $10M and your COGS are $3M, your gross margin is 70%. Gross margin plays an integral role in SaaS company valuations.

When a company moves from an on-premises data center to the cloud, they expect changes to affect engineering decisions and functionality. After all, their whole way of building and supporting new products has changed. What many companies don’t expect is that the switch to working with cloud providers also necessitates new budgeting and accounting practices.

With containerization, you can write an application once and run it anywhere. Along with portability, containers are also much more resource-efficient than traditional virtual machines (VMs). However, managing containers at scale can be challenging. Besides, many teams find container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes overkill and too complex.

Is your enterprise still paying the sticker price for cloud services? If so, you’re probably leaving a significant amount of money on the table. Once your company surpasses the level of “large business” and begins growing into a full-fledged enterprise, it likely qualifies for enterprise discounts offered by each of the major cloud providers. The most well-known of these would be the Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Building quality software is tough. Even automation requires skilled developers to make it work. Yet, good developers are in short supply. You could offer attractive packages, too. Think: hybrid working, breakfast burritos, and organic chicken wings every Wednesday. You'll still need to ask the right DevOps interview questions to find and hire qualified DevOps engineers.

At CloudZero, we advocate measuring every cloud cost metric that makes the most sense for your business. When you know your company’s unit economics inside and out, you can better inform each department, show them how to make smart decisions based on the information, and ultimately maintain control over your margins. One of the most universally useful metrics to track is cloud cost per customer.