Top 8 Cloud Cost Management Tools To Manage Cloud Costs

With the right approach, cloud cost optimization can be a powerful tool for driving innovation, growth, and success in the modern business landscape. Cloud cost optimization is essential for modern businesses that rely on cloud services to support their operations and drive growth. With the rise of digital transformation and the increasing complexity of cloud environments, enterprises face ever-growing demands on their cloud resources and budgets. Without proper management, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control, eating into profits and hindering the ability to invest in other business areas. By taking a proactive approach to managing cloud costs, businesses can significantly reduce their spending without sacrificing the performance and reliability of their cloud services. This can help companies to stay within budget, allocate resources more effectively, and ultimately become more profitable.

• By switching off all idle resources, you’ll significantly reduce costs on cloud bills, as unallocated and idle resources can quickly burn a hole in your wallet.
• With the right FinOps strategy in place, your organization can maximize cloud efficiency while managing spend and planning for future consumption.
• Here are several common cost models used in the cloud, which you can combine depending on your needs.
• Your scheduling policy needs to match the expected usage patterns based on historical data.
• This is usually a service-specific study, where one or more specific qualities of the service are taken under consideration.

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The cloud makes it easy to spin up new resources — which has allowed organizations to innovate faster but also makes it easy to rack up huge bills. This complicates budgeting and forecasting, which is essential for a business resource that is often on the top three items of a company’s COGS. Ensure that everything in your cloud is being used and not unidentified or forgotten! Examining the overall cloud fleet composition also leads to insights for capacity reservations and finding potential opportunities for further cost optimization. For example, knowing that over half your EC2 fleet is m4.4xlarge suggests there is a potential cost savings of 75% if those instances are reserved for the coming year. It also begs for questions like “Are the m4.4xlarge used because this is the correct size for the workload or is some widely-copied infrastructure template spitting out m4.4xlarge because it only uses one size?

What Is Cloud Cost Management?

However, as innovation, productivity, and collaboration increase, the cloud service’s value will grow too. In addition, FinOps also manages cloud optimization services to control cloud spending. However, another one of their tasks is to create a cross-functional team by integrating financial, technical, and acquisition experts. Here, cloud providers sell off spare capacity at high discounts, aka spot instances. The catch is that spot instances can be stopped at short notice by the cloud provider. Ideally, spot instances are used for single-day batch processes or very long-running processes that can easily be stopped and restarted.

RIs have been around a long time on the AWS platform, and have been an effective way to realize significant savings. More recently, AWS introduced AWS Savings Plans, which offer more flexibility while still returning substantial savings opportunities. This is great but can lead to confusion about when and how to use each of the different purchasing models.

The costs and usage are monitored to forecast the needs and the cloud infrastructure to be used. Most public cloud services offer native software for cost optimization and management. For instance, AWS and Microsoft Azure have tools that gather valuable cost metrics.

In-the-way governance, where centralized IT collects and manages all requests for cloud services. The cloud interface is hidden from other departments, which eliminates any autonomy. However, you can determine how to split costs for these resources by tagging nested virtual resources instead of the primary services.

Meet with Cloud Experts to Devise a Winning Cloud-Cost Strategy

When organizations transition to the cloud, on-demand consumption can exhaust promised cost savings and push consumption beyond the planned budget. In addition to cloud-native options, third-party cost monitoring tools help organizations make smart spending decisions. For example, CloudCheckr, now owned by NetApp, tracks spending across cloud resources and provides recommendations on where to cut costs. CloudZero and Densify are other examples of third-party cloud cost monitoring and management tools. Today the majority of companies use multiple clouds, which makes it critical to adopt multi-cloud cost management strategies.

This information can be used to track usage through detailed billing reports. List Resources – Finalize the list of resources that are required for your cloud environment. Thus, you can make spending on only required resources and ignore the unapproved ones. For example, an entire organization can use only one network connection for accessing cloud services or train from a single e-learning app. So, if you’re using a consumption-based cloud billing model, you’ll need to distribute costs between all parties accurately.

What are the common challenges to controlling cloud costs?

Major public cloud providers including AWS, Azure and GCP do not have standardized billing models, formats, or services. Effective cloud cost reduction is much more than merely disposing of unused resources to control prices. Instead, companies should find the balance between expenses and performance to reduce cloud bills without sacrificing productivity. To achieve that, you need to introduce appropriate practices, apply iterative monitoring, and ensure tight collaboration between stakeholders.

For example, development teams often focus on speed and efficiency and forget to manage cloud costs. A cloud cost management tool can analyze resource health to provide more accurate forecasts. Cloud computing offers greater flexibility and often an improvement in efficiency.

Upfront Payment and Static Savings Plans

Horizontal autoscaling usually includes limits for available resources, such as a maximum number of provided instances. Idle compute instances are common in testing environments and have extremely low usage metrics. Larger enterprises can encounter difficulties during allocation management if multiple departments share platforms. The finance dept approves budgets and resource allocations, plus it implements chargeback and showback models. They define business KPIs for each application in terms of performance, availability, and expected usage. In some cases, traditional solutions can limit your productivity, which will only add to your expenses.

Not every small business stays small, and thinking big leads to planning, providing unique insights, and potentially big wins. Cloud cost management tools help you manage all costs related to cloud resources, optimization, and management. These tools help you plan the cloud budget as per the unit cost, COGS, cost per client analysis, forecasted cloud cost, right-sizing, resource allocation, and automated scaling.

By comparison, Google Cloud Storage allows users to specify where storage buckets are geographically stored. Regularly monitoring and analyzing cloud service cost data is essential to a successful cloud cost optimization strategy. By understanding your resource utilization and spending patterns, you can make informed decisions about optimizing the costs of your cloud services. Many cloud providers offer free services or trials that can be used to optimize cloud costs.

IBM Cloud Backup for VPC: Automated Snapshot Management of Block Storage Volumes

Traditionally, managing cloud spend was the responsibility of DevOps or cloud administrators. But with cloud computing now one of the top operating expenses at many organizations, achieving the full benefits of cloud computing requires fundamental changes in cloud financial management. Implementing a FinOps practice is essential to bringing financial accountability to the complex and variable spend model cloud cost management of the cloud. It is common for a large enterprise to have a configuration management database, and a tag identifying that a cloud resource belongs to an app that has been permanently shut down is very useful. Metadata about cloud resources can also inform the intensity of cost optimization efforts, with the most critical resources being given the most tolerance for underutilization and idleness.

These take into account the costs of different public cloud providers and enable cost management of multiple clouds on one pane of glass. GCP Cost Management provides detailed metrics and logs for monitoring cloud resource usage, as well as cost optimization features such as budgeting, forecasting, and alerting. GCP Cost Management also offers historical cost reports that allow businesses to identify opportunities for savings and improve their overall cloud efficiency. Cloud cost optimization is an ongoing process, and it’s important to regularly control costs and resource usage toto identify savings opportunities. It’s also important to stay up-to-date on the latest pricing options from cloud providers and use them to your advantage. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at cloud cost optimization and provide practical tips and strategies for reducing your cloud costs.

Fortunately, there are tools and cost optimization practices that can help eliminate unnecessary spending. Cost optimization also helps organizations strike a balance between cloud performance and spend. You can achieve a great ROI using spot instances if you prioritize cost savings over ensuring reliable access to the cloud services. If the cloud service provider has spare computing capacity (i.e., instances not used by any customer), it can sell the limited availability to the highest bidder at a significant discount. Both reserved and spot instances can help businesses significantly reduce their cloud costs, provided they are used appropriately. It’s important to carefully evaluate your workloads and resource needs to determine whether reserved instances or spot instances are a good fit for your business.

Best Practices for an Iterative Cloud Cost Optimization and Cost Management Practice

Understanding the different pricing options is important for models choosing the right cloud cost model and determining how the CSP bills you. Given the volatility of supply and demand, cloud offerings usually have dynamic cost models. A cloud cost model can be time-based, cost-based, or auction-based, depending on several factors. https://globalcloudteam.com/ If you have ever attempted to read your AWS cost and usage reports and struggled to make sense of your cloud bill, we understand your pain. Some of the world’s largest organizations use our cloud cost intelligence technology to scan through thousands of line items in their AWS cost and usage reports and interpret them.

” Note that the EMR service has minimum instance size limitations, so there will be cases where some larger instance types are required. That’s why companies should add a tagging strategy to track resource spendings across all their projects and accounts. Cloud cost optimization tools can give companies an in-depth understanding of what happens in their IT environment (including over-provisioned and underutilized resources).

Manage cloud costs with Unitrends

While many cloud cost optimization tools can help you reduce cloud spend to some degree, few have the ability to provide the detailed data needed to reasonably administer these best practices. Most cloud cost optimization software products essentially look backwards, and lack the ability to map costs directly to the activities that generate them. Cloud infrastructure is becoming more complex and as a result, cloud costs are difficult to track, visualize, and predict. The pay-as-you-go pricing model used by most public cloud providers makes this problem worse, because spend can fluctuate dramatically depending on the actual resources being used.