Is Your Cloud Budget Getting Lost in the Clouds? | ✉️ #52

Promotional graphic for 'MKDEV DISPATCH #52' featuring an illustrated person with glasses looking thoughtful, paper airplanes, a question about cloud budgets, and an orange background.

Hey! 👋

Remember when back in 2022 Gartner predicted that over half of enterprise IT spending would be on public cloud by 2025? Well, here we are in 2024, while I am reading the most recent report by Flexera and - oh my! - that forecast is feeling pretty spot on. And as the cloud becomes more integral, it’s also bringing a new pain in the ass: managing skyrocketing costs.

According to the that latest Flexera report, managing cloud spend has overtaken security as the top concern for organizations! This isn't just a sheep sneezing, considering how obsessed we’ve been with keeping our digital assets safe. What’s truly eye-opening is that an estimated 27% of cloud spend is going to waste… That’s right - nearly a third of your budget could be going up in smoke, and for many companies, the cloud bill is already 15% over budget. Only 35% of organizations have automated policies for tagging cloud resources, a simple yet crucial step to keep costs in check (we have a video about it on your YT channel). The rest? They’re likely wandering in the dark, unsure where their money is really going.

And while FinOps - the practice of managing financial operations in the cloud - is gaining ground, it’s still not mainstream. This leaves a huge gap for inefficiencies to thrive. So here’s the question: Are you one of those companies struggling to make sense of your cloud spend? Or worse, are you unknowingly pouring money into a black hole?

As we inch closer to 2025, it’s worth reflecting on whether your cloud investments are delivering the promised value. We've been thinking a lot about this lately and have decided to offer a limited number of free Cloud Cost Audits to our community. It’s a straightforward process - just fill out a short application to see if your organization qualifies.

And since you’ve made it this far, check those awesome illustrations we’ve crafted for this idea. Picture an adventurer navigating ancient labyrinths, dodging traps, all in search of that elusive treasure—your missing cloud budget. If that piques your interest, you know where to find us :)

What We've Shared

Life-Work Balance and Remote Work in Brazil and Europe: Can you just stand up and go when your workday is oficially over in your country?
DevOps Accents #44: The Importance of DevOps Community with Johannes Koch from FICO. Can the community influence the evolution of cloud technologies? What is its impact on personal and professional growth? Do we underestimate the value of networking and knowledge sharing? Johannes Koch, Senior Engineer at FICO and AWS DevTools Hero, joins Pablo, Leo and Kirill for this episode of DevOps Accents.

And on the website Pablo uncovers the biggest cloud scam and explains Google Cloud costs:

The Biggest Cloud Scam
Understand your Google Cloud Costs: Billing, Cost Management and Budgets

What We've Discovered

Ephemeral Values in Terraform: As long as Terraform exists, we have a problem of managing ans storing the secrets inside our HCL code. In this in depth article, core developer of Terraform explains the complexities of this topic and how it might get solved in the future with the help of the ephemeral values. Must read for any Terraform user.
Delivering Millions of Notifications within Seconds During the Super Bowl: A story about how Duolingo sent 4 mln mobile notifications within 5 seconds, using ECS, SQS and lots of smart engineering around those.
10 Best Terraform Tools To Use In 2024: An excellent selection of tools, most of them can really speed up transition to infrastructure as code.
The complexity of phone networks: An entertaining collection of all the possible phone network related quirks you might encounter when trying to call or send SMS automatically.
Automate Rotating Credentials using Terraform: Kirill says, somehow this is the first time I learn about “replace triggered by” feature of terraform. Excellent article on automation-friendly secrets rotation!

An announcement

Looking forwrad to meeting us this autumn? Check out our event calendar for September, October and November!

The 53rd mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, September 13th. See you next time!