A major problem led Amazon to introduce Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Reports. Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) users were overspending on services they couldn't quite identify. Before the two cloud financial management tools, the AWS public cloud was like a buffet menu without prices. Engineers could use as many cloud resources as they could get away with (and then some), only to be hit with surprise bills at the end of the month or billing cycle.

YouTube. Netflix. Uber. Spotify. TikTok. You name it. You sign up and get your own account. Once you set it up however you want, you can access it from any internet-enabled device, including smartphones and smartwatches. In case your device breaks, is lost, or you switch to a new one, you can still access the account, as well as the settings and information it contained, from another device without having to recreate everything from scratch.

It’s almost impossible to create an optimized cloud system out of the gate and keep it running at a perfect balance over the long term. There’s almost always something that could benefit from some tweaks and adjustments. Cloud costs have a way of creeping up slowly while you’re not paying attention. And if you’re not careful, they can spiral out of control before you realize anything is happening.

Just about everything you interact with digitally is enabled by the cloud. Whether you’re doom-scrolling on Instagram, binge-watching on Netflix, ride-hailing on Uber, or downloading super-cool cloud podcasts (hint, hint) on Spotify, you’re using the cloud. But most people don’t have any idea what the cloud is, where it came from, or what we, as a species, spend on it.

For Amazon to survive, they needed the cloud. But they had to invent it — and creating the cloud meant overcoming obstacles fundamental to the nature of software development at the time.

An easy way to understand what the early cloud did is to think of it like a public utility. The same way buildings depend on a common set of utilities — gas, electricity, and water — software projects depend on a common set of services: compute, storage, and database. “Compute” refers to the power it takes to run the software.

Every time your company onboards a new client or releases a new product, your cloud bill will grow. In fact, it doesn’t take a large event at all to see a spike. Whenever your company changes direction even slightly, it can affect the bottom line. Add to that factors such as economic inflation and increased demand for high-speed, high-power cloud services, and it may seem like each month’s cloud bill is higher than it was before. If that’s the case for you, you’re not alone.

In financial forecasting, looking at the past helps predict what's possible in the future. You can plan ahead, take informed action, and avoid losing your market advantage. The finance department and other teams examine the relationships between variables to come up with more realistic financial plans. With a vast amount of financial data to analyze, multiple teams to consult, and a range of forecasting techniques to choose from, financial forecasting can be a daunting process.

Kubernetes has been described as everything from “awesome!” to “I regret my life choices,” and with 84% of all Kubernetes cloud workloads running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it should come as no surprise that AWS created Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to eliminate much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting it often takes to manage. What do companies like about Amazon EKS?

DevOps doesn’t necessarily look like it used to. Engineers used to build software designed for on-prem hardware; they had a specific methodology for efficient production and distribution schedules; and they didn’t interface very much with non-engineers, if at all. Today, all that has been flipped upside-down. Cloud-era DevOps engineers now must possess wildly different skill sets, and some previously non-negotiable skills have faded into the past.