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AWS Cloud Optimization is an essential part of any AWS environment, as it allows organizations to get the most value out of their cloud investment while minimizing costs. The process involves selecting, provisioning, scaling and right sizing computing resources for maximum performance, availability and cost-efficiency. In this complete guide, we’ll take a look at the best tools available to help supercharge your cloud cost optimization and cost savings. But first, let’s go over a few cloud cost optimization basics.
What is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud optimization is critical for companies aiming to accelerate business outcomes, achieve high ROI on spend, and fully leverage their data. Essentially, it involves the continual process of selecting and allocating appropriate resources for specific workloads or applications.
There are two key principles that underlie cloud cost optimization: pay less, and get more cloud resources for every dollar.
Best practices for AWS Optimization
Amazon Web Services is the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud provider, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Some best practices for getting the most ROI on your AWS resources include:
- Regularly right sizing resources, identifying idle resources to pause or eliminate
- Scheduling resources during off-peak hours
- Understanding the AWS pricing structure and purchasing Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments for long-term savings
- Utilizing cost-effective Spot Instances to lower compute costs
One key aspect of cloud cost optimization today is leveraging ML and automation tools to help find and implement cost-saving recommendations. The right tools can help simplify and speed up the process of cost optimization, empowering engineers to take action on optimizing their cloud usage. This is particularly important because cloud cost optimization is a continuous process as your business needs and dynamic usage evolve.
14+ Best Cloud Optimization Companies
Let’s dive into the list of the best tools for controlling cloud costs and optimizing your cloud spend.
#1: nOps: Fully Automated AWS Optimization
nOps is a ML-powered FinOps automation platform that helps AWS users reduce their costs by up to 50% on autopilot.
With nOps, users can benefit in two key ways. First, you get better performance at a lower price without the financial risk. nOps charges based on a fraction of your savings, so you only pay if you save.
Second, nOps offers an all-in-one suite of solutions tailored to your preferred tools and services. nOps makes it simple and easy for engineers to take action on cost optimization, so that their time is freed to focus on building and innovating. Its features include:
Compute Copilot
Compute Copilot automatically selects the optimal compute resource at the most cost-effective price in real time for you.
Business Contexts
Business Contexts helps you understand 100% of your AWS bill with cost allocation, chargebacks, showbacks, and tagging.
Commitment Management:
nOps offers risk-free automatic life-cycle management of your EC2/RDS/EKS commitments.
Cloud Optimization Essentials
Automation tools integrate with your IaC to help you automatically rightsize EC2 instances, schedule resources, pause unused resources, and optimize your EBS storage.
AWS MAP Cost Management
nOps offers a platform to help you maximizes MAP funding, automatically tags resources, and tracks credits for efficient cloud migration
Well-Architected Framework Review:
You can automate your WAFR assessment & reporting for optimal cloud architecture through the nOps platform.
nOps processes over $1.5 billion dollars in cloud spend and was recently named #1 by G2 in the cloud cost management category. Book a demo to find out how nOps can help you start saving today.
#2: Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS-native Cloud Cost Optimization Tools
If you’re looking to get started with some AWS-native tools to manage your cloud spend, a range of options are available to help you access, organize, understand, control, and optimize your costs. Let’s discuss some of the most important.
- AWS Cost Explorer: This tool provides detailed visualizations of your AWS cloud spend and usage cost trends. Cost Explorer enables you to analyze your AWS usage patterns across different AWS services, identify trends, and pinpoint cost drivers. It also offers forecasting capabilities to predict future cloud spend.
- AWS Budgets: AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to monitor and manage your cloud costs and usage. It sends alerts when your cloud spend or usage exceed predefined thresholds — helping you stay within your financial operating limits and prevent overspending on your cloud budget.
- AWS Trusted Advisor: This service scans your AWS environment to offer recommendations that can help you follow best practices. Trusted Advisor covers various aspects including cost optimization, where it suggests ways to reduce wasted spend, improve system performance, and enhance security.
- AWS Compute Optimizer: AWS Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS resources for your workloads based on utilization data. This service helps you choose the right configurations for your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and AWS Lambda functions, which can lead to cost savings and performance improvements.
While AWS services are an essential part of your toolbox, third-party tools can help simply and automate some of these processes, helping you to aggregate and analyze data in an intuitive way. Some third party tools also offer more aggressive or varied strategies for cost savings, such as more dynamic resource allocation methods, detailed cost allocation and chargeback to cost center features, and sophisticated commitment management (like handling Reserved Instances across multiple accounts or services, or offering a risk-free buyback guarantee).
#3: Cloudability: Cloud Cost Management Platform
Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost optimization solution that enhances control and visibility over cloud expenses. It allows enterprises to efficiently manage their cloud spending in terms of associated costs, performance, and quality.
The platform features comprehensive tools for budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing as part of its financial management offerings. A key strength of Cloudability is its emphasis on FinOps, assisting leaders in aligning cloud expenses with business outcomes and enabling finance departments to track costs effectively for precise budget planning and resource allocation back to each cost center and business unit.
Although Cloudability excels in financial management and budgeting, it is somewhat less focused on integrating cost adjustments and suggestions directly with the operational tasks of engineering teams. After Cloudability issues recommendations, the responsibility to evaluate and implement these suggestions rests primarily with the engineering staff.
#4: Densify: Cloud and Container Cost Visibility and Resource Management
Densify, also known as Intel Cost Optimizer powered by Densify, offers automatic optimization for Kubernetes environments and cloud instance configuration. This platform’s subscription may be included by Intel for eligible organizations.
A notable feature of Densify is its application of Machine Learning to thoroughly analyze the behaviors of workloads and the offerings of cloud providers. This continuous analysis ensures optimal alignment of cloud services and applications with the most suitable cloud infrastructure. The platform is versatile, supporting various cloud services and is ideal for both multicloud and hybrid cloud setups.
#5: ProsperOps: Commitment Management Platform
ProsperOps is an automated optimization service that manages purchase commitments (such as AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans) on AWS and GCP. The service monitors usage of your resources and automatically adjusts discount instruments.
For example, it manages AWS Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments on your behalf, analyzing your usage to purchase and sell commitments as needed to maximize savings outcomes while preserving sufficient flexibility.
While ProsperOps does not manage your Spot instances (in contrast to tools such as Spot by NetApp or Xosphere), its algorithms are Spot-aware.
#6: Datadog: Cloud Monitoring Tools
Datadog stands out as a leading monitoring and observability platform, gathering metrics and events from across the entire DevOps stack. While primarily known for its capabilities helping you monitor cloud computing spend, Datadog’s Cloud Cost Management feature also plays a crucial role in helping manage cloud expenditures. It provides engineers with vital cost information alongside specific resource data such as CPU usage, memory, and requests, all within the context of their specific services and applications, enabling effective cost management actions.
Moreover, Datadog facilitates detailed insights into your AWS or Azure expenditures, aiding in the accurate allocation of cloud costs and enhancing decision-making confidence regarding spending. In a strategic move to bolster this capability, Datadog has recently teamed up with nOps. This partnership aims to streamline the process for engineers looking to implement rightsizing recommendations, making it more accessible and actionable.
#7: Zesty: Cloud Spend Optimization
Zesty is an advanced cloud cost optimization tool that employs an AI-driven model to enhance the efficiency of cloud resource utilization. This model is developed from a combination of real and simulated data on cloud resource consumption, allowing it to predict the exact resources an application will need in real-time, including CPU cores and storage specifications.
Utilizing these accurate predictions, Zesty automates various operations such as resizing, scaling up or down, adjusting storage volumes, and managing the acquisition or release of public cloud instances. Currently, Zesty’s capabilities are focused specifically on optimizing EC2 instances, leveraging its insights to drive cost savings and efficiency in cloud deployments.
#8: FinOut: FinOps Cloud Costs Management
Finout is a FinOps focused cloud cost optimization and observability platform that streamlines the financial monitoring of cloud resources. By integrating real-time data analytics, Finout provides organizations with precise insights into their cloud spending across various services and platforms. This tool is particularly adept at breaking down expenses by individual resources, departments, or projects, enabling detailed tracking and allocation of costs.
Finout’s platform supports proactive cost management through features such as custom alerts for budget thresholds and predictive analytics for forecasting future spending.
#9: Flexera: IT and Cloud Cost Optimization
Flexera is dedicated to enhancing the visibility, allocation, and efficiency of cloud expenditures on a large scale. It offers actionable insights, budget management tools, and cost control policies designed to help organizations manage their cloud spending more effectively and avoid unexpected costs.
A key advantage of Flexera is its suite of automation tools that facilitate the implementation of its recommendations, thereby making cost optimization and governance more manageable and scalable.
#10: Kubecost: Kubernetes cost management and monitoring
Kubecost provides real-time cost analysis and optimization for Kubernetes, offering insights into how resources are being utilized and where savings can be made.
It integrates directly into your Kubernetes environment in AWS, GCP, Azure or on-prem, delivering detailed reports on costs by namespace, deployment, or other common Kubernetes concepts, enabling teams to understand the financial impact of their Kubernetes workloads.
Kubecost also offers features for finance teams that allow you to allocate costs, map costs back to cost centers, analyze your monthly spend, and set alerts that help organizations to implement cost-saving measures and avoid budget overruns.
#11: CloudZero: Cloud Cost Optimization Platform
CloudZero is a cloud cost optimization tool that helps provide detailed breakdowns of cloud expenditures, allowing you to understand the specifics of where, when, and how your cloud resources are being spent. It features automated tagging and Slack notifications to facilitate the tracking and attribution of cloud costs across different teams, customers, key performance indicators, and product features.
The platform supports real-time cost monitoring for Kubernetes and Snowflake, covering various cloud environments including public, private, hybrid, and multicloud systems. Additionally, CloudZero offers coaching support to guide and enhance your cost optimization strategies, helping you make informed decisions to effectively manage and reduce cloud spending.
#12: Nutanix: Hybrid Multicloud Management
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an integrated multi-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that facilitates the creation of a self-service portal for IT resource consumption. It is particularly focused on offering a unified platform to help you seamlessly integrate and manage infrastructure across public clouds, hybrid clouds, and private cloud environments.
NCM enables Systems Administrators and Architects to easily define VMs and applications using straightforward blueprints, which manage all aspects of the application lifecycle, including provisioning, scaling, and cleanup.
#13: CloudBolt: Cloud Management Platform
CloudBolt is a cloud management platform designed to simplify the orchestration, automation, and management of cloud resources across multiple cloud providers. It serves as a helpful tool for enterprises aiming to optimize their cloud operations and enhance financial governance. CloudBolt provides a unified interface that allows IT teams to manage public, private, and hybrid cloud resources seamlessly, making it an ideal solution for multi-cloud strategies.
The platform excels in offering visibility into cloud spend and usage with detailed analytics and reporting features, helping organizations understand and control their monthly cloud spend effectively. It also has automation capabilities enabling users to rapidly provision and deprovision resources, enforce compliance policies, and implement measures to reduce costs across their cloud environments.
#14: AppDynamics: Cloud Observability and Application Performance Management
AppDynamics is a comprehensive application performance management (APM) and IT operations analytics tool that helps businesses ensure that their applications perform optimally, are highly available, and deliver exceptional user experiences. AppDynamics offers a real-time, end-to-end insight into application performance, from the user interface through the network to the database. This holistic view is powered by its dynamic baselining and machine learning capabilities, which automatically detect anomalies and pinpoint root causes of performance issues.
AppDynamics additionally offers business performance monitoring, tying technical metrics to business outcomes. This unique approach allows companies to directly correlate application performance with business metrics, providing clear visibility on how application changes and performance impact business results. Additionally, AppDynamics supports a variety of environments including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid, and integrates seamlessly with other Cisco technologies for enhanced network visibility and security insights.
About nOps
nOps is an AI-powered FinOps automation platform that helps AWS users optimize their cloud infrastructure for minimal engineering effort. The platform offers an all-in-one suite of cloud optimization solutions, including nOps Business Contexts for understanding 100% of your AWS bill with cost allocation, chargebacks, showbacks, and tagging.
nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $1.5 billion in cloud spend for our customers.
Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
