Craig Lowell

As the largest chunk of most organization's IT spend, public cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control if not properly optimized and managed. And with so many services available, there are many different areas where your AWS spend can potentially be reduced, freeing up waste that can re-invested in other, more impactful cloud services.

This ebook lays out the many areas where AWS users can investigate and look for ways to trim excess costs, take advantage of discount mechanisms, and reconfigure workloads to make better use of their cloud spend.

Keeping your cloud resources consistently tagged for cost allocation, chargeback, or showback can be a tedious challenge. One mis-tagged EC2 instance or an unlabeled VM, and suddenly your billing data is fragmented and unreliable.

With DoiT CloudFlow, you can automate the entire process. CloudFlow scans across your AWS and Google Cloud environments, identifies resources missing required tags, applies them automatically, and generates a complete audit report—all from a single prompt.

The promise of FinOps is clear: better visibility, smarter cost management, and optimized cloud spending. But for many organizations, achieving these goals requires significant manual effort. Teams spend hours sifting through recommendations, coordinating across departments, and implementing changes—often leading to delays, inefficiencies, and missed savings opportunities. Without automation, FinOps teams struggle to act quickly on cost insights, limiting their ability to maximize cloud effic...

When cloud cost optimization strategies are more trouble than they’re worth, take the effortless route to cloud savings
For all of the scalability, reliability and flexibility the public cloud offers, there is still no such thing as a free lunch. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud allow you to use and pay for compute power and services as you need them, but doing so on a purely on-demand basis incurs high costs. At some point, on-demand public cloud usage becomes cost-p...

Commitment discounts are complex and require large investments of time and money. Automation can unlock those savings with minimal effort or risk.
For as long as the public cloud has existed, users have been trying to figure out new ways to optimize their spend and prevent their cloud costs from spiraling out of control. Optimizing areas like your storage or database usage can certainly help, but the greatest opportunity to lower your public cloud costs lies in optimizing your compute spend. ...

After a year’s postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UEFA 2020 European Football Championship tournament (aka the Euros) ended up playing out over 4 weeks across June and July, culminating with the Italian national team defeating England in the championship match on July 11. As one of the most prestigious international football/soccer tournaments in the world – and one that fans had to wait an extra year to see – UEFA Euro 2020 unsurprisingly drew huge streaming audiences on OTT plat...

Although the travel and hospitality industries took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, the return to normalcy will bring a surge of traffic and revenue back to them in the coming months. However, with so much demand on the horizon, two questions loom large for travel and hospitality companies:
How will they continue to differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace?
How can they reduce costs and improve efficiency after the financial impact of the past year?
Consumers tend to have...

Here's everything you need to double check before the game, thanks to the masters of the double check: State Farm.

Retailers have been at the forefront of digital transformation strategies since before the term ‘digital transformation’ had really entered the lexicon. For over two decades, ecommerce providers have been seeking ways to create new customer-centric shopping experiences through the use of websites and mobile apps, cloud migration endeavors, and most recently, edge technology solutions.
Standing out in a crowded market
The hard truth is that retail is one of – if not the most – competitive indu...

Like other industries that rely on positive customer experiences to grow and maintain their business, banking and financial service providers must be able to provide fast, reliable and personalized digital applications to meet the increasing demands of their users. With an already crowded marketplace being further disrupted by new-age banks that operate entirely online with no physical locations, traditional banking institutions have significant ground to make up if they want to remain releva...

As digital architectures become more distributed and the edge continues to extend closer to end users than ever before, securing applications and the networks on which they rely has become an equally rising challenge. In addition to traditional threats, security teams must now account for the fact that flexible application and service deployment strategies also mean that malicious actors have potential entry points in every corner of the globe.
Meeting these threats head-on requires network a...

Delivering a live sports broadcast – or any live streaming event, for that matter – requires many different moving parts that must all work perfectly in sync. In addition to the actual filming of the event, a broadcaster must also invest in server infrastructure, network infrastructure, and software in order to get the video files from the on-site event location all the way to the end-user devices. Should any performance or availability issues occur to the live video delivery chain, viewers c...

As we all continue to adjust to the new reality with which the world has been confronted in the first nine months of 2020, the idea of “returning to normal” is very much a moving target. More realistically, our social and professional lives are on a winding and unpredictable path towards a “new normal” as we find new ways to work, learn, socialize, and be entertained.
Online video has been and will continue to be at the heart of many of these new ways of life. Whether it’s getting on group ca...

Network engineering and operations teams are currently faced with a paradoxical dilemma. On the one hand, the capabilities for delivering content and services to end users are more robust and diverse than ever thanks to the explosion of third-party infrastructure and services. The adoption of new IT architectural structures such as multi-DNS, multi- and hybrid-cloud, multi-CDN, and others means that when everything is operating smoothly, end users are getting content and services delivered to...

Ensuring the health of your BGP routes is one of the most important parts of a robust network monitoring strategy. When any of your IP prefixes are unreachable for end users, you need to know as soon as possible with direct, actionable data that pinpoint the exact nature of the problem. Without this kind of incisive real-time BGP alerting, troubleshooting end-user experience issues becomes much harder, leading to increased mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Sett...