Top 17 cloud cost management tools

Keeping on top of the outlay of your cloud estate is more important than ever. These platforms will help you get a pulse on your cloud use and associated costs, which can add up rapidly.

It feels like just yesterday that we were promised that cloud servers cost just pennies. You could rent a rack with the spare change behind the sofa cushions and have money left for an ice cream sandwich.

Those days are long gone. When the monthly cloud bill arrives, CFOs are hitting the roof. Developer teams are learning that the pennies add up, sometimes faster than expected, and it’s time for some discipline.

Cloud cost managers are the solution. They track all the bills, allocating them to the various teams responsible for their accumulation. That way the group that added too many fancy features that need too much storage and server time will have to account for their profligacy. The good programmers who don’t use too much RAM and disk space can be rewarded.

Smaller teams with simple configurations can probably get by with the stock services of the cloud companies. Cost containment is a big issue for many CIOs now and the cloud companies know it. They’ve started adding better accounting tools and alarms that are triggered before the bills reach the stratosphere. See Azure Cost Management, Google Cloud Cost Management, and AWS Cloud Financial Management tools for the big three clouds.

Once your cloud commitment gets bigger, independent cost management tools start to become attractive. They’re designed to work with multiple clouds and build reports that unify the data for easy consumption. Some even track the machines that run on premises so you can compare the cost of renting versus building out your own server room.

In many cases, cloud cost managers are part of a larger suite designed to not just watch the bottom line but also enforce other rules such as security. Some are not marketed directly as cloud control tools but have grown to help solve this problem. Some tools for surveying enterprise architectures or managing software governance now track costs at the same time. They can offer the same opportunities for savings that purpose-built cloud cost tools do — and they help with their other management chores as well.

What follows is an alphabetical list of the best cloud cost tracking tools. The area is rapidly expanding as enterprise managers recognize they need to get a grip on their cloud bills. All of them can help govern the burgeoning empire of server instances that may stretch around the world.

• Anodot
• AppDynamics
• Apptio Cloudability
• CloudAdmin
• CloudCheckr
• Datadog
• Densify
• Flexera One
• Harness
• Kubecost
• ManageEngine
• Nutanix Xi
• ServiceNow
• Turbonomic
• VMware Aria CloudHealth
• Yotascale
• Zesty

Read more HERE

Direct-hire Application Security Architect Opportunity in Plano, TX

If this opportunity is not a good match for your skills or you are not available but know someone who is, please forward this email to them as we pay referral fees for anyone you refer that we place with a client.

Direct-hire Application Security Architect Opportunity in Plano, TX

The Application Security Architect will be a part of the F&P Business Solutions on our Software team and will report directly to the Head of Architecture. The Architect will work closely with development teams, product teams, and other teams across the organization to integrate security into the product lifecycle from design through deployment. Ideally, the Architect is a subject matter expert in defining security requirements, performing application security assessments, and providing developers with remediation guidance and advice. On any given day the Application Security Architect can be pulled in to evaluate a new system, review a proposed network change, or provide guidance on application security/coding best practices.

  • Work independently with developers, system/network administrators, product owners, and other colleagues to ensure secure design, development, and implementation of applications and networks
  • Perform security architecture design reviews of our products (primarily cloud)
  • Perform or supervise vulnerability testing, risk analyses and security assessments
  • Respond immediately to security-related incidents and provide thorough remedial solutions and analysis
  • Perform code analysis of large applications, manually and using SAST and DAST scanning solutions as well as conducting manual vulnerability analysis
  • Provide remediation guidance and recommendations to developers and administrators
  • Work with Product Development teams to help prioritize and validate urgency of mitigation of identified product vulnerabilities and security feature enhancement requests
  • Define security best practices and standards and ensure Product Development teams understand them and receive pertinent annual secure coding training
  • Work closely with the Global Security Architecture team for security standards alignment

What you need is:

  • Minimum five (5) years’ experience in software development hands-on experience and SDLC practices
  • Minimum two (2) years’ experience in the Application Security Architect role providing application security guidance to multiple product teams simultaneously
  • Experience working with development teams to build secure solutions
  • Experience breaking down complex systems and applications to find flaws
  • Proficiency in reading, writing, and auditing .Net and Angular applications and the ability to pick up new languages/technologies
  • Strong familiarity with common vulnerabilities and attack vectors
  • Knowledge of web service technologies, load balancer services (i.e. Nginx, Elastic Load Balancing, F5, etc.) and RESTful APIs
  • Knowledge of ubiquitous encryption technologies (PGP, SSH, SSL, etc.) and common authentication protocols (OpenID Connect, OAUTH, SAML, RADIUS, LDAP, KERBEROS, etc.)
  • Solid understanding of secure network and system design in both cloud (AWS etc.) and conventional environments
  • The ability to communicate complicated technical issues and the risks they pose to developers, network engineers, system administrators, and management
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, interpersonal and collaborative skills
  • Must be a critical thinker, with strong problem-solving skills
  • High level of personal integrity, as well as the ability to professionally handle confidential matters, and show an appropriate level of judgment and maturity
  • Self-starter, positive attitude, ability to work independently, enjoys learning and staying current with industry developments, regulations and best practices.

Preferred Experience:

  • Experience as an Application/Product Security Engineer, Architect or Developer
  • A background integrating security testing into the SDLC (preferably the SCRUM framework)
  • Experience providing security training to developers

If you have this experience, feel you are a fit for this position, and are interested, please answer the questions below:

    Your Email (required)

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    Are you open to a direct-hire position?

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    Are you currently eligible to work for any employer in the US?

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    972-200-7171

    IT leaders face reality check on hybrid productivity

    Once an organizational boon, hybrid work productivity is on the wane. Many CIOs see more time in the office, new leadership skills, and streamlined collaboration offerings as part of the answers.

    CIO Ted Ross believes the honeymoon is over for breakneck productivity when it comes to hybrid work, and he’s not the only one. Tech employees at the City of Los Angeles IT agency who were forced to work remotely in the early pandemic days were very efficient, Ross says.

    “Fully into the pandemic we had a 34% increase in project delivery,” he adds. But since then, productivity and innovation have waned, in part because of fading relationships between once in-person teams, along with a slew of new IT employees — 45 in the past year — who haven’t yet built those relationships.

    “We’re actually very supportive of hybrid telework,” Ross says. “It comes down to finding a balance” of what can be done effectively remotely and what needs to be done in the office, he adds. In response, Ross started training supervisors on how to create those relationships with digital “checkpoints” to keep productivity humming.

    At insurance company National Life, CIO Nimesh Mehta says his IT team saw productivity increase 26% during the pandemic “because I think people didn’t have anything better to do than work,” Mehta says. “Now I’m seeing productivity drop.”

    The same goes for innovation. “We’re a team that likes to work together, likes to whiteboard and solve problems,” he says. “When we lost that, I asked my team to tell me one thing we came up with that was innovative during COVID that we actually executed — not ideas that we had in the past that we just did faster — and there was dead silence.”

    Hybrid productivity on the wane

    It’s a familiar scenario for many CIOs. Productivity increased markedly during the shift to remote work, but it is now lagging behind what many leaders want it to be, bringing about a reckoning on how to remain productive in hybrid times.

    In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can producein an hour — plunged by the sharpestrate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    When it comes to hybrid productivity in the tech and services world, perception and reality are often misaligned. In a recent survey of more than 20,000 people, Microsoft found that 87% of employees say they are productive at work, while only 12% of leaders have confidence that their workers are being productive. The company also analyzed trillions of anonymous productivity signals from its products and found that for the average worker, meetings, chat, and after-hours and weekend work have all increased over the past two years.

    Indeed some types of IT task-based work can be done productively from home, but relationship-based tasks — innovation, strategic planning, relationship-building with customers or stakeholders — are difficult to do remotely.

    To reset the productivity and innovation scales, companies are recalling workers back to the office a few days a week, giving team leaders extra latitude with managing their own teams, and streamlining a glut of collaboration tools brought in hastily during the pandemic, ensuring productivity can return to pre-pandemic levels (or higher) and innovation can get back on track.

    Here are a few examples of adjustments IT leaders are making to help hybrid workplace arrangements work better for their organizations.

    Read more HERE

    Direct-hire Senior Systems Engineer Opportunity in Lewisville, TX

    Sr. Systems Engineer

    A Senior Systems Engineer is responsible for the development, maintenance and continuous improvement of core infrastructure platforms. This role will engineer solutions based on industry best-practice, leveraging their technical expertise along with available resources to include partner relationships. Enthusiasm in delivering solutions of superior quality and workmanship is as important as meeting deadlines. Outstanding soft-skills are an integral part of the Senior Systems Engineer’s toolkit. The Senior Systems Engineer will participate in team efforts which evaluate new hardware, operating systems, applications and other technology to identify components that may improve the infrastructure. A Senior Systems Engineer must have the ability to gather business requests and translate them into project requirements to deliver sound technical solutions. Projects require extensive collaboration and coordination with stakeholders, internal business units and third-party vendors so effective communications skills are required. The Senior Systems Engineer will provide Subject Matter Expert level operational support for infrastructure platforms and services.

    Responsibilities

    • Infrastructure scripting, automation and Wintel server hardening
    • Hypervisor installation, configuration, maintenance and migrations
    • Datacenter host, storage and ancillary appliance provisioning and operations
    • Public Key Infrastructure maintenance and operations
    • Data and server backup maintenance and bare metal recovery operations
    • Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager operations
    • DNS-DHCP-IPAM maintenance and operations
    • Install, configure and maintain Microsoft Active Directory Infrastructure
    • Active Directory GPO design and operations
    • Intall, configure and maintain all VMware components in the environment
    • Install, configure and maintain storage appliances from multiple vendors.
    • Install, configure and maintain Wintel compute nodes and hosts from multiple vendors
    • Install, configure and maintain geographically dispersed hypervisor deployments
    • Manage VMware vCenter environment for 500+ virtual machines.
    • Identify and resolve infrastructure hardware and software failures in a timely manner.
    • Deliver post-mortem and Root Cause Analysis documentation as needed.
    • Proactively enhance the stability of all infrastructure platforms.
    • Adhere to company Change Management and system security protocols.
    • Update infrastructure documentation with system diagrams, process flows and other related artifacts.
    • On-call after hours support on a rotating schedule for Sev1 infrastructure outages.
    • Ensure stable Service Delivery of infrastructure resources.
    • Monitor Incident and Service Request queues to ensure timely resolution.
    • Mentor teammates and engage the business to foster technology adoption.
    • Monitor system performance throughout the enterprise and identify bottlenecks.
    • Maintain patch management schedule for infrastructure components.
    • Identify drift from engineered system specifications and maintain Configuration Management.

    QUALIFICATIONS

    Qualifications

    • 5+ years directly administering enterprise infrastructure platforms
    • 5+ years administering VMware hypervisor and clustering technologies.
    • 5+ years of experience administering complex virtualized infrastructure.
    • Excellent analytical skills and troubleshooting methodology.
    • Expert knowledge of Active Directory, Exchange Server and System Center.
    • Solid understanding of MS SQL, IIS, enterprise printing and faxing solutions.
    • Experience building large, scalable and highly available mission critical systems.
    • Experience with backup and disaster recovery solutions.
    • MCSE, VMware or other advanced infrastructure certifications are a plus.
    • Knowledge of the Microsoft M365 product suite is a plus.
    • Knowledge of Cisco Webex or other collaboration suites are a plus.
    • Bachelor’s degree in information technology or equivalent; or six years related experience in server hardware, operating systems, active directory; or equivalent combination of education and experience.

      Your Email (required)

      Position You Are Applying For?

      What is your availability to start?

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      Mike Hanes
      ProVisionTech

      972-200-7171

      mhanes@provisiontechgroup.com

      Remote Contract-to-hire Software Engineer Opportunity with Great Company in Dallas, TX

      If this opportunity is not a good match for your skills or you are not available but know someone who is, please forward this email to them as we pay referral fees for anyone you refer that we place with a client.

      Remote Contract-to-hire Software Engineer Opportunity with Great Company in Dallas, TX

      The team this candidate will be on is our integration team. Candidates must enjoy and be comfortable with the “middleware” layer there is only about %5 UI work. Strong C#, .net, API, SQL, XML, Json, postman, and be able to understand complete data flows. Azure development experience is essential.

      Preferred profile:

      Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a combination of equivalent degree and/or experience

      5+ years of professional software development

      5+ years working with C# and the .NET platform

      3+ years working in Systems Integration

      Master’s degree preferred

      Technology Stack

      We need candidates that know the technologies below (listed in order of importance). If you know five that’s great.

      C#

      .NET Core \ .NET Standard

      Web API framework

      XML, Json

      SQL Server

      Azure Functions

      Azure Storage

      Azure Service Bus

      DevOps (CI/CD Pipelines)

      Azure Functions v2 with .Net Core

      If you have this experience, feel you are a fit for this position, and are interested, please answer the questions below:

        Your Email (required)

        Position You Are Applying For?

        What is your availability to start?

        Are you open to a contract-to-hire position?

        What is your current salary or pay rate?

        Are you currently eligible to work for any employer in the US?

        When is the best time to contact you and what # can you be reached at for this opportunity?

        Upload Your Resume

        Regards,

        Mike Hanes
        ProVisionTech

        14 ways to advance your IT career

        Technology careers may have no set paths, but there are a few time-honored truisms that can help you get an edge. Here, seasoned IT pros lend their hard-earned advice on advancing.

        Perhaps your tech career feels like you’re treading water, and you wonder why your peers are progressing more quickly than you are. Or maybe you’re looking to shake things up and take the next step in your career. Regardless, it’s helpful to regularly pause, reflect, take the long view to optimizing your path, and stay open to new opportunities.

        Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned veteran, tech leaders say there are ways to keep moving forward that aren’t always obvious. 

        As with the technology industry, change is constant for IT pros. Here accomplished leaders offer their best tips on how to advance in your IT career so you don’t get left behind.

        Jump in the deep end
        Find a mentor
        Treat your career like a project
        Keep learning
        Execute as well as you plan
        Get feedback from colleagues
        Take the road less traveled
        Be open to opportunity
        Make a call, then revisit
        Take a step back
        Keep it simple
        Keep thinking big
        Bring value
        Employ empathy

        Read more here