
Understanding and Controlling Cloud Costs
The widescale migration to cloud and the embracement of cloud-native application architectures has been a blessing to developers and those responsible for deploying and maintaining modern applications. Container-based apps allow fast changes compared to monolithic apps. And cloud services let DevOps teams quickly launch instances and acquire resources for all stages of their work. The […]

FinOps 101: Demystifying Cloud Financial Operations for DevOps
In an ideal world, all organizations would have a dedicated FinOps team—or at least a single specialist who could work to ensure that the cloud was operating in a financially savvy way. Of course, in reality, most organizations are strapped for skills and are operating lean teams where responsibilities are spread thickly across employees. In […]

How to Avoid the Most Common Online Service Costs
Throughout the last year and a half, most organizations were forced to either create or develop their online service offerings at a rapid pace. Companies had to find alternate solutions to continue day-to-day operations in the transition to remote-first. Low development costs and the wide range of use cases have been primary factors in the […]

Avoiding Budget Overruns During Cloud Migration
Many organizations have already started their migrations to the cloud, or soon plan to. It makes sense: The cloud is an attractive option for multiple reasons, including its potential for cost savings, scalability and support of continuous application development. However, benefits aside, it can be very easy for enterprises to lose financial control of a […]

Harness Updates Cloud Cost Control Tool for DevOps Teams
Harness today announced that it has updated its cloud cost management (CCM) module for its namesake continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to add support for Kubernetes at the node level in addition to providing business intelligence tools to analyze overall cloud costs. Harish Doddala, senior director of product management for Harness, said the update surfaces […]

Are You Wasting Money in the Cloud?
I’m not the first person to point out the issues with Andreessen Horowitz’s blog post outlining why Dropbox is repatriating from the public cloud to data centers and saving an enormous amount of money. But while others have brought up valid points about how Dropbox is not representative of most companies and that the value […]

Stop Hiding the Cloud From Your Developers
If you say a person or organization “goes to great lengths” to achieve something, it means they try very hard and perhaps do extreme things to accomplish their goal. One example I’ve seen is that of more traditional companies “going to great lengths” to “hide” the cloud from their pool of potential technical consumers doing […]

Designing Cost-Efficient Cloud Environments
Today, the days of on-premises data centers are mostly behind us, and the cloud has largely taken over with the promise of scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency. Despite these promises, the cloud often falls short of these ideals. Why? Because managing the cloud is hard—especially when it comes to managing its costs. There are no automatic […]

No-Nonsense Guide to Distributed Databases
I got my first DBA job 15 years ago, and quite a few things have changed since then. The amount of data exploded, we saw the rise of NoSQL, and business logic moved away from being stored in relational databases to applications. To this day, the three pillars of reliability, scalability, and maintainability are the […]

Cloud Governance Can Trim Cloud Costs
The abrupt need to transition to remote work last year caused many companies to migrate to the cloud or accelerate an in-process migration. Cloud has become an essential part of company operations and budgets. Last year, worldwide end user spending on public cloud services was $257.5 billion, making up 9.1% of total global enterprise IT […]

How to Respond to Rising Cloud Costs
As organizations ascend to the cloud, their cloud expenses are floating to the same lofty heights. But are all cloud costs necessary? The answer is a resounding no — there’s a lot of waste. In 2020, organizations wasted $17.6 billion on idle cloud resources and cloud overspending, according to ParkMyCloud. Data egress, upgrades and subscriptions […]

From ‘Cloud Zombies’ to Multi-Cloud Experts
A significant risk associated with cloud migration is overspending. For years, zombie-like obedience to AWS has resulted in price lock and escalating fees at many organizations – this is a tale for fighting the cloud zombies. Cloud costs around data egress or application bandwidth are often not transparent and thus highly unpredictable. Complicating this problem […]

FinOps Foundation to Help Rein in Cloud Costs
A new consortium has been formed to promote best practices for controlling cloud computing costs. Announced at the Cloud Economic Summit, the non-profit FinOps Foundation counts among its founding members Atlassian, Autodesk, Cloudability, HERE Technologies, Just Eat and Nationwide. Cloudability co-founder J.R. Storment said the goal is to bring financial accountability to variable cloud spending […]