These days, data is king. With the right cloud services, data can be stored at almost zero. Cloud data services offer the best in data storage and management. Cloud costs are one of the largest expenses for all companies. Zippia predicts that U.S. cloud spending will reach $90 billion by 2022. This is huge!
No matter what cloud model you use, SaaS or PaaS or IaaS, cloud costs will rise to their maximum. Because of their incredible benefits, it is impossible to avoid them. Cloud cost optimization and cloud cost management services are available to solve this problem. Let’s dive deeper into the terms.
What is Cloud cost management?
Cloud cost management is also known as cloud spend management. It refers to the process of managing cloud expenses effectively to reduce costs and maximize returns. This involves monitoring, measuring, and controlling cloud spending in order to determine the most cost-effective options. It involves cloud cost control for components such as memory, storage, network traffic, and instances.
Cloud cost management has been about maximizing returns and cost-cutting. Modern cloud cost optimization services have made it possible to optimize the cloud infrastructure for each customer’s needs. To forecast cloud infrastructure needs and costs, the usage and costs are tracked.
Also read: What Is Cloud Optimization and How to Strategize for Cloud Cost Management?
Benefits of Cloud Cost Management
Cloud management offers more than just cost control. It also provides benefits such as predictive management and efficient architectural changes. These are the top benefits of cloud cost optimization that you should know:
- Cost savings: Businesses that plan ahead for cloud costs can avoid unnecessary spending and underutilization.
- Predictability: Companies that forecast their cloud computing needs accurately will not be surprised by an unexpected jump in costs. They may be eligible for early bird discounts on the predicted usage.
- Architectural changes: Analyzing expenditure also helps businesses optimize the cloud infrastructure they have. This can be done by making a shift, or by making necessary improvements to the existing architecture.
- Efficient Usage: The merits of load balancing, autoscaling, and capacity reserving discounts and other saving programs can be a lifesaver amidst cloud spend management.
- Insight: This tool helps you manage cloud costs and provides visibility into cloud resources and architecture. It also aids with governance and security.
How to Manage Cloud Costs?
Understanding unit economics is essential to manage cloud costs. It also helps you understand why it matters in cloud spend management. Unit economics simply means determining the unit change. Let’s now get to the reason why it matters. Let’s look at the example below.
Cloud infrastructure costs are not something to worry about. It is common for a company to have a higher cloud bill if they are adding clients each month. It is great news and nobody would like to see it go down. What if you consider that your costs are increasing not due to the additions, but because of the increase in customer costs? This is something that should be taken into consideration. Unit economics is a great tool to help you manage your costs. Your business must track the cost per client, COGS, and unit cost as part of the cloud cost control plan. Cloud cost optimization tools are a great tool for analyzing these parameters.
Top 8 Cloud Cost Management Tools
Cloud cost optimization tools are available in a multitude of formats. Choosing the right one can cause business headaches. Let us help you pick the best. Here are the top 8 cloud cost management software:
1. nOps
nOps has a unique approach to cloud cost management tools. Their pricing and technology are unlike any other in the market. Customers pay only if they optimize spending. Competitors charge a percentage of overall spending. Their unique pricing model allows them to focus solely on building tech and customer experience. They offer automation for FinOps’ Inform, Optimize, and Operate phases. They provide a FinOps automation platform that is more comprehensive than any other on-point solution.
nOps helps reduce cloud waste, allows you to run workloads on spot instances, and automatically manages reservations. It also helps you optimize your containers. All of it is data-driven and automated. It is an all-in-one AWS solution that helps you reduce cloud waste, optimize container clusters, save on-demand resources, and act as a spot orchestrator, to lower costs over on-demand resources. You can use chargebacks and chargebacks to help you better allocate cloud costs.
Cloud accounts can be consolidated into one pricing model, which allows for continuous visibility to change requests and helps you manage cloud costs more effectively. This helps you to understand the why, how, when, and whereabouts of your cloud accounts. This allows you to manage and supervise your cloud spending more effectively.
2. AWS Cost Explorer
Amazon Web Services offers a cloud cost optimization service called AWS Cost Explorer. This innovative program helps to identify unusual spending identify cost patterns, and reduce overspending. This tool is most useful for finance teams that need a detailed overview of their cloud infrastructure costs and savings potential. It’s great for starting small. However, as teams get more sophisticated, it is often difficult to use this as the sole source of cloud cost optimization. Cost Explorer’s interface is also less user-friendly than other cloud cost optimization tools.
Also read: Top 10 Cloud Testing Tools for 2023
3. Azure Cost Management + Billing
Azure Cost Management + billing is similar to the native cloud cost management tools Microsoft Azure offers. It allows you to analyze, optimize, and measure cloud costs. The essentials are included, such as cost analysis, forecasting, and exporting cost management data. You also get cost optimization suggestions based on Azure cost management benchmarks. The tool can also be used to manage billing information for Azure and AWS. The tool’s features may not be up to standard because it is a native integration and not a premium service.
4. CloudZero
CloudZero is a cloud cost management software delves deeply and breaks down expenditures to allow you to see where, when, and how your cloud spends money. It can alert you on Slack when cost anomalies are discovered to help prevent overruns. This tool allows you to monitor real-time costs for Kubernetes or Snowflake across public, hybrid, hybrid, and multi-cloud systems. The cloud cost intelligence tool places cloud expenses within the context of your business, links engineering and finance as well as encourages engineers to be cost-conscious.
5. Densify
Densify uses machine learning to assist you in cost optimization. There are many cost-saving strategies and options to reduce your cloud computing costs. Cloud cost management software can save you money, spot vulnerabilities, and alert you if you are spending too much on instances or starting with inefficient families of instances. The flexibility of the software to work in different cloud environments and optimize CPU usage is an important feature for managing cloud costs. Densify is a great tool for managing cloud costs, regardless of whether it’s running in a single-cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment.
6. Spot by NetApp
Spot by NetApp is a modern cloud cost management tool that is primarily designed to assist businesses in automating cloud cost optimizations based on data. Spot allows for automatic implementation, whereas other tools only show potential. Spot can also be used to implement manually. Spot is a cloud management platform. It also predicts spending based on past usage data. It is difficult to get a clear view of cloud charges without good tag management. Prices are not visible at the daily level. Security concerns are also raised by the requirement that vendors be able to manage their internal resources independently for cloud cost optimization tools.
7. Harness Cloud Cost Management
Harness is a CICD platform with cloud cost management software that focuses on increasing cost transparency, optimization, and governance. Harness gives you cost-effective visibility to your apps, services, and environments without the need for human tagging. It gives hourly transparency into cloud resource costs and categorizes them as idle, used, or unallocated. It also offers suggestions for surface savings across different workloads and supporting information. The platform lacks critical cloud automation and optimization features such as spot instance utilization, autoscaling, and rightsizing. An organization might also need to change its culture in order to fully benefit from the product.
8. Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is one of the best cloud cost management tools that help users gain visibility into their spending and manage it. This tool also helps businesses to visualize their costs during a cloud migration. Apptio Cloudability offers budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing as a financial management tool for tracking, reporting, and evaluating cloud costs. FinOps and finance departments are the best users of this tool. It is not able to look into the cost of unallocated and idle resources. Additionally, as cloud cost management software, It is also not capable of linking engineering changes with cost changes. It can only perceive cost changes.
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