Cloud billing is inherently complex; it's not just you.

Apply a few basic hardening principles to secure your cloud environment. I've written about simple server-hardening techniques in the past. Those articles were inspired in part by the Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks book I was writing at the time, and the idea was to distill the many different hardening steps you might want to perform on a server into a few simple steps that everyone should do. In this article, I take the same approach only with a specific focus on hardening cloud infrastructure. I'm most familiar with AWS, so my hardening steps are geared toward that platform and use AWS terminology (such as Security Groups and VPC), but as I'm not a fan of vendor lock-in, I try to include steps that are general enough that you should be able to adapt them to other providers.

DivvyCloud's unique niche in the IT ecosystem is helping organizations automate and manage their multi-cloud infrastructure at scale.

Kubernetes is an open-source cluster manager that makes it easy to run Docker and other containers in production environments of all types (on-premises or in the public cloud). What is now an open community project came from development and operations patterns pioneered at Google to manage complex systems at internet scale.

The promise of automation always has been its ability to manage a wide range of tasks across all your systems, whether they're in your own data center or somewhere in the cloud. But in order to automate, you need to know what you have, and that's getting harder these days.