Whether or not you take the oft-quoted statistic that 30% of companies’ cloud spend as gospel, one thing is for sure: Companies have been spending recklessly in the cloud ever since its inception. For (fairly) good reason — companies wanted to perfect their products and snatch up market share before an even more reckless spender did. But the chickens of overindulgence are finally coming home to roost.

In the early 2000s, Amazon faced an existential threat: Speed up their pace of software engineering, or risk losing eminence in the burgeoning e-commerce landscape.

Combined, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) control 67% of the global cloud computing services market. That’s a big deal, but not for obvious reasons. Here's the deal. Azure, AWS, and GCP all have vast experience managing cloud infrastructure. This can mean better services, engineering training, and superior technical support for you. In addition, they have the resources to drive innovation and back up your data worldwide.

Amazon Redshift processes petabytes of data, making it one of the most popular data warehousing solutions on the market. It uses Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) technology to process massive volumes of data at lightning speeds. Plus, Redshift costs a fraction of the cost of other data platforms. This guide will provide a deeper understanding of Redshift to help you determine whether it's the best data warehouse solution for your organization. Table Of Contents.

In SaaS companies, engineers are the biggest influencers to cloud costs. They choose the infrastructure, build the products, and produce the code. Unfortunately, having this power means engineering managers are often asked to predict cloud spend months or even years into the future. An executive or a head of finance might approach the engineering head and ask how much the company will spend on cloud costs next year, thinking he or she should naturally have the answer.

While AWS offers significant benefits compared to traditional on-premise infrastructure, its inherent elasticity and scalability tend to give rise to uncontrolled costs. AWS costs can be opaque and difficult to analyze — and without some system of identifying the source of costs and how to manage them — they can quickly undermine your profit margins. However, a number of tools have emerged over the past few years to help organizations manage and optimize their costs.

It’s cloud earnings week this week for AWS, GCP, and Azure, and I have already heard the pundits warming up the hot takes. Some are even asking if this could be the end of the cloud. My advice to you: Don’t be that person unless you enjoy being horribly wrong. No, I'm not saying that when AWS, Azure, and GCP report their growth that it's going to be anything different than what we expect.

The first person to coin the term “Artificial Intelligence” predicted that someday people would buy software as a utility. The year was 1961 and that person was Professor John McCarthy, a computer scientist at Stanford University. After Salesforce began selling software programs this way in the late-1990s, the good professor witnessed his prophecy come true for over 12 years before his passing in 2011. Yet this is only one aspect of computing in the cloud as we know it today.

If you have trouble understanding Microsoft Azure Storage pricing, you’re not alone. Azure Storage options can feel like a multi-layered maze of storage account types, tiers, pricing pages, specs — and then some. Yet, understanding your cloud cost drivers begins with looking at where your money goes. Only then can you tell if you are getting value for your money.

As we were planning “Cloud Atlas,” our primary goal was to talk with someone who was “in the room” during the genesis of the cloud. Allan Vermeulen, who worked for Amazon from 1999-2021, and who proposed Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), became that source. Allan is a born engineer. He has always enjoyed building things — whether “out of bits and software or boards and lumber,” Allan takes pleasure in creating useful things.