Some DevOps teams are well-oiled machines, but it’s taken time to get there. Perhaps they didn’t have the right culture or processes in place to start. Maybe they lacked some tooling that could help facilitate more efficient processes.

Managing cloud spend isn’t just a DevOps issue, but there are some nasty cost-related surprises that DevOps teams can run into according to Jeff Valentine, CTO at cloud management platform CloudCheckr.

One is relying on AWS Pricing Calculator results and presenting them to the business as-is when the tool can’t factor in what the business is trying to achieve, how the team will run the software or what mistakes the DevOps team may make. Another “gotcha” is failing to consider the cost of bandwidth, which can account for 5% or 10% of a bill. A third pitfall is believing that shutting off an EC2 instance will stop costs from accruing when the EBS volume was never deallocated.

There are all these weird analogues that were never ‘a thing’ on premise so they didn’t realize they had to ask about it,” said Valentine. “Also, they tend not taking advantage of cost savings plans because they just don’t want to spend the time learning.

DevOps is a journey that requires patience and dedication on everyone’s part. While strong leadership is needed to succeed, there are technology, process and people elements, all of which need to be addressed.

Continue reading What’s Holding DevOps Back? on Information Week.