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Identifying great business optimization opportunities is tougher than it seems. You often need to weigh the projected revenue and costs of taking a new path against the potential opportunity costs of not taking that path. Not only is this an apples-to-oranges comparison, but also a “what if” scenario riddled with variables. For instance, what if slashing costs makes the customer experience so much slower and more frustrating that sales decline and you wind up losing revenue?

Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the two most popular cloud providers today. They both offer a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, you'll find products covering multiple computing areas, such as compute, storage, analytics, and networking. You can also deploy AWS or Azure services in the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid setup.

SaaS companies are known for their strong margins. With gross margins typically in the 60-90% range, even SaaS companies with comparatively weaker margins have a compelling business model when compared with most other industries. Nonetheless, even a few percentage points of margin can have a huge impact on a company’s valuation and overall success. This chart, taken from a great article by Villi Iltche at Two Sigma Ventures, shows the correlation between gross margins and valuation.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) eases deploying and running Kubernetes on the AWS platform. A fully managed Kubernetes service, EKS eliminates the need to install, configure, or maintain Kubernetes nodes or control planes on your own. With EKS, you can leverage the performance, scalability, and availability of AWS infrastructure, along with integrations with multiple AWS compute, storage, security, serverless, and networking services.

Whether you’re new to Kubernetes or a bona fide wizard, it may seem like getting any meaningful cost data out of it is a miracle. This is because many organizations that migrate to Kubernetes unwittingly step into the Black Box of Kubernetes Spend. In pre-Kubernetes life, teams could allocate costs by tagging resources.

Business leaders frequently need to make decisions that could impact the entire future of a company. Armed with pages of data and financial reports, many executives choose to slash costs, double efforts on certain products over others, or otherwise forge ahead with major decisions about cloud usage, spending, and overall business strategy. Great choices could mean huge profits, but unwise choices could spell doom for the business as a whole.

Cloud cost intelligence is a game-changing way to understand where your money is going and what that means for your business. Any company with a cloud services bill can benefit from a cloud cost intelligence strategy that outlines which spending decisions are beneficial and which should be scrapped in favor of something else. But let’s say you have done your background research and you understand what cloud cost intelligence is and why it matters. Where do you go from there?

Accurate, fair budgets make everyone in the company happy. Engineers love when they can build products that make the company money, executives enjoy seeing nice, wide margins, and finance departments celebrate when everything goes according to plan. But keeping the budget for cloud computing reasonable can seem like a lofty goal when your company’s cloud spending seems to change with the direction of the wind.

The age of growth-at-all-costs is over. Profitability matters — and it matters now. For SaaS companies who rely heavily on the public cloud, understanding what’s driving (or hurting) profitability can be tricky. Different customers have different needs and usage patterns, drive different levels of cost, and impact profitability unequally. Cybersecurity has played a central role in CloudZero from the beginning —or really, before it.

Managing gas bills has a lot in common with managing cloud spend. In the summer, our gas bill increased with our summer adventures. Sitting home with the kids out of school and the warm summer months was not an option. Likewise, while discounts on gas certainly help, in reality they do not put much of a dent in the overall bill. The cheapest gallon of gas is still the one not used. If you’re a modern cloud-native business, you can’t just stop using the cloud.