Cloud DevOps Essentials - Part 2

We are furthering our exploration of Cloud DevOps

Author

Vishakha Sadhwani
May 22, 2025

Hi Inner Circle,

Welcome back to Part 2 of Cloud DevOps! This time, we're diving into those crucial topics that are often overlooked but frequently pop up in interviews – they can truly make or break the deal.

Welcome to Week 3 – let's continue our deep dive into Cloud DevOps.

Cloud Cost Optimization (FinOps)

Core Concepts

1. Visibility & Allocation: this ensures every cloud cost is tracked, categorized, and attributed to the right team, service, or project.

2. Right-Sizing & Scaling: this helps in continuously adjusting resources to match actual usage—avoid over-provisioning and under-utilization.

3. Commitment-Based Discounts: use long-term pricing options like reserved instances, savings plans, or spot/preemptible resources to lower predictable costs (most enterprise companies secure long-term discounts based on their usage)

4. Budgeting & Alerts: VERY CRUCIAL - set budgets and trigger alerts to control spend, prevent surprises, and encourage proactive cost management.

5. Shared Ownership : need to foster collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams to align cloud investments with business goals.

  • AWS Cost Explorer/Budgets: These are AWS's native services for visualizing your spending, setting custom budgets, and getting alerts when costs exceed your thresholds.

  • Azure Cost Management/Budgets: Azure's integrated tools that provide comprehensive views of your cloud spending, allowing you to analyze, forecast, and control costs across your Azure resources.

  • Google Cloud Billing/Budgets: GCP's equivalent services for managing your cloud invoices, understanding cost trends, and setting up budget alerts to prevent unexpected expenses.

  • Kubecost: A specialized tool for Kubernetes environments that offers detailed visibility into container costs, helping you optimize resource allocation and spending within your clusters.

Benefits (used when)

  • Gain deep insights into where your cloud budget is being spent.

  • Identify idle or underutilized resources and rightsize them to save money (very important)

  • Implement strategies like Reserved Instances or Spot Instances to significantly lower your infrastructure costs.

  • Predict future cloud expenses more accurately, aiding in budget planning.

  • Foster a culture where teams are aware of and responsible for their cloud expenditures.

Serverless DevOps (FaaS & BaaS)

Core Concepts

  1. Event-Driven Execution: functions and services are triggered by specific events—making systems responsive, modular, and loosely coupled.

  2. Stateless & Ephemeral: every execution is independent with no persistent server or in-memory state—ideal for short-lived, isolated tasks.

  3. Auto-Scaling by Design: serverless platforms scale automatically based on traffic or triggers—no manual provisioning or scaling required.

  4. Integrated CI/CD Pipelines: deployments are automated end-to-end using CI/CD pipelines—enabling rapid iterations with minimal human intervention.

  5. Built-In Observability: cloud-native tools provide out-of-the-box monitoring, logging, and tracing—crucial for debugging and optimizing distributed serverless systems.

  • AWS Lambda: Amazon's flagship serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You only pay for the compute time you consume.

  • Azure Functions: Microsoft's event-driven serverless compute service that enables you to build and deploy applications rapidly, reacting to various events.

  • Google Cloud Functions: GCP's serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services, allowing you to write small, single-purpose functions.

  • AWS AppSync: A fully managed service that simplifies building data-driven applications by handling the complexities of GraphQL APIs, including data fetching, caching, and real-time updates.

  • Firebase (BaaS examples): Google's comprehensive platform that provides backend services like databases, authentication, hosting, and storage, allowing developers to focus on front-end experiences.

  • Serverless Framework: A powerful open-source framework that helps you build, deploy, and manage serverless applications across various cloud providers using a unified approach.

  • AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model): An open-source framework for building serverless applications on AWS, offering a simplified way to define your serverless resources.

  • Azure Durable Functions: An extension of Azure Functions that allows you to write stateful serverless workflows, enabling complex orchestrations and long-running operations.

  • Google Cloud Run: A fully managed compute platform that lets you run stateless containers invoked via HTTP requests or as jobs

Benefits

  • No servers to provision, patch, or manage, simplifying infrastructure management.

  • Automatically scales up or down based on demand, ensuring your applications can handle fluctuating loads without manual intervention.

  • Only pay for the actual compute time consumed by your functions, leading to significant cost savings for intermittent workloads.

  • Enables rapid iteration and deployment of applications due to the simplified infrastructure and event-driven nature.

  • Developers can focus on writing code and business logic rather than worrying about server infrastructure.

Cloud Governance & Compliance Automation

Core Concepts

  1. Policy-as-Code: governance rules are codified and integrated into CI/CD pipelines to enforce security, compliance, and operational standards automatically.

  2. Automated Compliance Checks: infrastructure is continuously scanned against frameworks (like CIS, HIPAA, GDPR) to identify and report violations in real time.

  3. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): access to cloud resources is restricted based on roles and responsibilities, reducing risk and supporting least-privilege access.

  4. Audit Logging & Monitoring: all user actions, API calls, and system events are logged and monitored to maintain traceability and support regulatory needs.

  5. Drift Detection & Remediation: systems automatically detect when configurations drift from approved baselines—and trigger alerts or apply fixes to stay compliant.

  6. Resource Tagging & Classification: resources are tagged with metadata to improve visibility, ownership tracking, cost allocation, and policy enforcement.

  • AWS Config: Continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations, allowing you to track changes and evaluate compliance against predefined rules.

  • AWS Control Tower: Provides a straightforward way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment, enforcing best practices and guardrails.

  • Azure Policy: Allows you to create, assign, and manage policies that define rules for your Azure resources, ensuring they adhere to organizational standards and regulatory compliance.

  • Azure Blueprints: Enables cloud architects to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implement and adhere to an organization's standards, patterns, and requirements.

  • Google Cloud Config Connector: A Kubernetes add-on that lets you manage your Google Cloud resources directly through Kubernetes APIs, enabling GitOps for your cloud infrastructure.

  • OPA (Open Policy Agent): An open-source, general-purpose policy engine that enables you to define policies as code and enforce them across your cloud environments, applications, and CI/CD pipelines.

Benefits

  • Ensure all your cloud resources adhere to your organization's security, cost, and operational policies.

  • Continuously monitor and audit your cloud environment for compliance deviations, reducing manual effort and human error.

  • Prevent non-compliant resource deployments before they happen, enhancing your security posture.

  • Generate compliance reports easily, simplifying internal and external audit processes.

  • Apply governance rules across multiple accounts and projects efficiently as your cloud footprint grows.

To dive into Cloud Networking – a crucial backbone of DevOps – read more here

Each of these topics is essential to understanding how modern cloud-native delivery works—or at the very least, the foundational DevOps concepts you should be familiar with as you grow in your cloud engineering role.

You already know about the free resources now:

Now what’s next?

By the end, we’ll complement these topics with crucial cloud projects that you can build to showcase your cloud skills on your resume.

Stay tuned for Part 3!

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