After watching part one and part two of our FinOps Automation Series, hopefully you’re chomping at the bit to adopt your first automation solution. In part three below, our experts — Erik Peterson (CTO and Founder of CloudZero), Alan Hand (Founder and CEO of Xosphere), Steven O’Dwyer (Senior FinOps Specialist at ProsperOps), and Mike Fuller (CTO of the FinOps Foundation) — are going to walk you through what you need to know before you take any concrete steps.

Access to critical business data, such as cloud cost data, is both incredibly important for finance, engineering, and DevOps teams, but also a privilege that should be managed carefully. This month, our engineering teams put a major focus on developing industry-leading capabilities related to access control, while also making it easier for people who require certain kinds of data to get it where it needs to be.

If you’ve recently migrated your data from one major cloud provider to another, you may have already noticed one of our top stories from last month. If not, we’ve got good news, so keep reading! And there’s even better news if you’re the type to get excited over the chance to learn more about FinOps and hone your craft.

Many often wonder, “Is there a difference between observability and monitoring?” The thing is as IT environments have become more complex, monitoring alone has become increasingly less effective. That’s because while monitoring is crucial, it isn’t particularly suited to tracking unforeseen or unexpected turns of events. That’s what observability is meant for. This guide will clarify what observability and monitoring are – and how they differ.

Research firm, IDC, published a study in early February 2024 predicting that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers break even after just 10 months. Moreover, the study, The Business Value of Google Cloud IaaS, reported that after migrating to GCP, the participants were on track to achieve a 318% ROI in five years. Here’s the thing. Achieving these milestones requires a robust GCP cost monitoring and optimization plan.

The first installment of our FinOps Automation Tips and Best Practices series focused on what FinOps is and why automating it can be a game-changer for your business. Now we’re back for part two, which will guide you on how to choose your optimal outcome and select the best automation options to suit your needs. Enjoy the full video for an in-depth explanation, or see the brief summary below if you’re just here for the highlights.

Whether you are a developer, an IT professional, or a tech leader in your organization, AWS Fargate promises to make provisioning, configuring, and managing your containers’ servers easier. AWS Fargate is like that cool gadget you didn’t know you needed – it’s nifty, powerful, and a bit mysterious. In this post, we’re unraveling the mystery, including what Fargate is, its key features, and how it stacks up in terms of pricing and performance for serverless computing.

Google Cloud provides a wide range of services and tools to help engineering teams reduce the complexity of migrating and deploying applications in the cloud. As engineering teams work to improve the performance, reliability, and security of their applications, they also need to be conscious of cloud costs. But engineers often don’t have access to cost data, or they only see cost data in monthly reports.

Proponents of microservices claim more development velocity and reliability; more comprehensive test and vertical or horizontal scale with a container orchestrator; tons of flexibility around tool choice. They’re not wrong: When you build with a microservices architecture, you’re likely going to see cost improvements early in your software development life cycle (SDLC), driven mostly by the decoupling of services.

Over the past decade, the cloud computing landscape has transformed remarkably, evolving from a nascent technology into a fundamental component of modern digital infrastructure. As the technology has evolved, so too has the need to develop complex cost optimization strategies. A decade ago, businesses grappled with the complexities of brand-new cloud services, often facing challenges in managing costs due to opaque pricing models and a limited understanding of cloud economics.