Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There are many tangible benefits to using containers for your computing needs. Containers help break large applications into smaller packages that are more agile, scalable on-demand, resilient, cost-effective, and less resource-hungry than monolithic apps or workloads running on traditional virtual machines (VMs) or bare metal servers. They also enable developers to develop applications in one environment, deploy them in another, and run them anywhere.

Successful SaaS companies know that they can't rely on gut feelings alone to make business decisions. Data helps them uncover patterns, trends, opportunities, and potential gaps in their strategy that can give them a competitive advantage. Yet, simply collecting metrics can often give you a lot of data to analyze with little insight into what to do next.

Flexibility is one of the cloud’s biggest benefits, but also one of its biggest challenges. When you have different teams using resources in the cloud and deploying instances at the click of a button, your cloud environment could easily become chaotic. Without a definitive plan governing your cloud operations, your costs will inevitably spiral out of control. A cloud cost strategy is your action plan for managing costs and staying profitable while working and building products in the cloud.

Anyone familiar with the cloud understands there are a lot of misconceptions about how it works. For example, businesses often assume that operating in the cloud will be inherently less expensive than managing an on-premise application. But this is not always the case. In fact, your monthly cloud bill could be the same or more expensive than your on-premise costs.

Breakthroughs in engineering best practices often stem from a handful of top tech companies. Many of them share their behind-the-scenes stories at conferences, in blogs, and slide decks — or open source code. These companies invest millions of dollars and dedicated headcount in optimizing everything from uptime to engineering velocity — so why wouldn’t you look to them for inspiration?

Financial planning and analysis is becoming an increasingly strategic part of a SaaS organization. The role of finance is no longer about just taking inputs and calculating how they affect financial plans, but about driving business outcomes through effective financial planning. There is a popular Andreessen Horowitz article titled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” that showcases best practices compared to worst practices.

Tagging, as a means of organizing our cloud environments, has utterly, totally, failed us. If you have authored a tagging policy document, begged your engineers to properly tag their stuff, or just plain given up, then you know what I'm talking about. Tagging is broken, and I don't mean broken in a way that can be fixed, but rather that the entire concept just isn't getting the job done.

Few practices exemplify the impact of DevOps more than Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Anyone who remembers hearing “I don’t know why it’s not working; it worked on my machine …” can vouch for this! IaC provides a standard way to create declarative descriptions of infrastructure to represent desired environment states — essentially allowing teams to manage IT infrastructure using configuration files.

As cloud adoption continues to increase, organizations are recognizing the need for cloud operations. CloudOps, as it’s often called, has become the industry standard for cloud-powered enterprises that intend to get the most out of their cloud services. Previously, it was common for organizations to rush into cloud adoption, with IT operations handling cloud installation, management, and maintenance tasks. The cloud, at the time, was considered to be a complementary extension of on-premise systems.