Another year, another quantum leap in public cloud spending. 2022 saw organizations spend $491 billion on the public cloud; not to be outdone, 2023’s $563.6 billion marked the first year that public cloud spending exceeded half a trillion dollars. Accelerating cloud spend mixed with shaky macroeconomic conditions meant one thing: Efficiency has never been a higher priority for cloud-driven organizations.

To optimize costs, businesses must continuously assess the cost-effectiveness of their IT infrastructure. This article explores the financial implications of transitioning from traditional cloud IT infrastructure, characterized by elements like EC2, RDS, and non-containerized environments, to Kubernetes, a modern container-orchestration system. Traditional IT infrastructures have long been the backbone of many organizations, offering a certain level of predictability in cost and performance.

At CloudZero, we take special pride in helping our customers to optimize their cloud spend. We especially love it when a longtime customer has experienced so much success with our platform that they can’t help but sing their love of unit economics from the rooftops. In this interview, we sat down with Francis Pereira, Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering at CleverTap, to find out how CleverTap has evolved and grown during their years of partnership with CloudZero.

SaaS is a competitive sector, so finding ways to win on gross margin is increasingly crucial. By finding sustainable strategies that either increase your revenue or minimize your cost of goods sold (COGS), your SaaS company can gain a competitive advantage. Every SaaS brand wants to be profitable, but the definition of profitability varies greatly.

This is part three of seven in our Frugal Architect blog series. Read part one here, and part two here. In case you weren’t as giddy as CloudZero was at re:Invent this past year, we wanted to recount the seven laws outlined by Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, which he’s bundled into a framework called “The Frugal Architect” (check out the whole framework here). What is “The Frugal Architect”?

In traditional engineering organizations, development and operations teams are often siloed, a scenario that can lead to friction between them. For example, developers are encouraged to write and release more and better code. Operations engineers are responsible for preventing errors and bugs from affecting customer experiences. As a result, operations teams frequently serve as gatekeepers and can significantly slow deployments down – to ensure everything works first.

Cloud costs are notoriously hard to predict—trickier than deciphering the emotions of a housecat. Traditional cost management tools leave many companies with a lack of visibility into where their money is going, which holds back engineering teams from making informed savings decisions. These tools also fail to bridge the gap with finance teams, who speak a different language than their developer counterparts.

Managing cloud costs has been the top challenge in cloud computing for more than half a decade now. It’s bigger than cloud security or hybrid cloud management. Several studies estimate that more than a third of cloud budgets could not be accounted for in 2023 alone. If you are a current or prospecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer, AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Pricing Calculator can help you manage your costs better.