Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Traditionally, applications are developed and deployed on local servers managed by developers. This keeps the whole process under the control of one development team that is responsible for keeping the system running smoothly. With serverless computing, however, the server management and code execution within applications takes place remotely, under the control of the cloud service provider rather than an in-house development team.

Are your cloud costs out of control? Do you struggle with cost overruns or going over your cloud budget? Forecasting costs accurately can help you create a realistic cloud budget you can stick to and prevent cloud bill surprises. In this guide, we’ll cover why it’s so challenging to predict cloud costs and techniques you can use to create an accurate budget your organization will be able to maintain. Table Of Contents.

When you work in tech, there are certain truths about the holiday season you can always count on. For example, you’ll be holding your breath up until New Years waiting to see if deals will come across the line. The end-of-year planning you intended to have done by December 31, will inevitably bleed into January. And, without a doubt, you’ll spend your holidays trying to explain to your relatives what exactly it is that you do.

Since the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) company entered the market in 1999, Salesforce, the industry has exploded. Experts are predicting that the industry will exceed $600 billion by 2023 at an 18% compound annual growth rate. In order to play in this highly competitive space, SaaS companies need to have a deep understanding of their financial key performance indicators (KPIs).

Identifying the best payment plan for cloud services can be a challenge. For one thing, no two businesses are exactly alike. Since each organization faces a unique set of circumstances, it is tough to choose the best option from all the different cloud cost models without taking an in-depth look at business-specific aspects such as demand, spending preferences, and projected revenue over the next few years. On top of that, the payment plans themselves are very often confusing.

If IT Financial Management (ITFM) was as simple as widely presumed, we’d be seeing IT expenditure dropping globally with the continued adoption of cloud services. For example, in 2020 it was expected that 83% of enterprise workloads would move to the cloud. That move happened but the results didn’t come with the extensive cost reduction benefits that businesses envisioned. Organizations are actually spending more despite the workload migration.

Although refactoring isn’t typically listed as one of the core phases of the software development lifecycle, you cannot leave it out if you intend to keep code running efficiently. The unfortunate thing about software is, it doesn’t usually age very well. Even seemingly perfect source code progressively decays over time — due to the ever-morphing tech ecosystem.

A fundamental requirement for building a profitable product is finding ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency. When you’re operating in the cloud, it’s almost impossible to gain this insight without data. This is where data-driven software development comes in. Data-driven development is a software engineering approach that relies on data to guide the development process.

According to Amazon, On-Demand Instances are best reserved for short-term processes with uneven workloads that cannot be interrupted. This might partly explain why such EC2 instances are exceedingly popular with AWS users. On the flip side, however, it turns out that On-Demand Instances are also getting dumped for the sake of cloud cost optimization. Our recent Spot Instances guide, for instance, advises AWS users to consider making a switch and, consequently, enjoy up to 90% cost savings.

EC2 instances come with a spider web of charges — when you take a look at your bill, you’ll see there are hundreds of unique line items connected to your usage. In addition to the instance, you’re also billed for storage, data transfer, and networking associated with that instance. It’s important to fully understand those charges so you can find ways to optimize your costs.