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Understanding your cloud costs can be complex, particularly within high-growth, cloud-native containerized environments. And if you’re in the market for a new cloud cost optimization solution, figuring out the right platform to choose can be overwhelming.
There are a number of traditional solutions, like CloudHealth and Cloudability, plus newer platforms like nOps designed to meet companies’ latest needs.
If you’re looking to understand the difference between CloudHealth, Cloudability, and other platforms in cloud visibility and optimization space, this practical guide is for you. It covers the specific features, advantages, and disadvantages of each platform so you can make the decision that’s best for your business.
The emergence of CloudHealth and Cloudability
What is CloudHealth?
CloudHealth is a comprehensive cloud management platform designed for enterprises with complex, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. CloudHealth is built for cloud governance and automation, enabling large organizations to implement policies for cost allocation, chargeback, and accountability among departments and teams.
The platform has recommendations for many standard cloud cost management needs including cost anomaly detection, commitment recommendations, and resource rightsizing. CloudHealth also supports cloud financial management with customizable dashboards and reports that reveal actionable insights into spending patterns and resource utilization. However, it is less focused on implementing and automating these recommendations, which may require separate tools.
What is Cloudability?
IBM Cloudability is primarily tailored for Finance and FinOps teams, with tools for cost monitoring, allocating, and evaluating public cloud expenditures. The platform is adept at helping teams control cloud spending through budgeting and forecasting features. Users can set budgets for specific contexts and receive alerts if spending approaches or exceeds these thresholds.
Like CloudHealth, Cloudability is strongest when it comes to getting visibility into your cloud spend. It also offers anomaly detection capabilities, rightsizing recommendations, and some limited automation functionalities like scheduling daily cleanups of disconnected EBS volumes or managing EC2 and RDS instances during low utilization periods.
nOps: The Complete Cloud Cost Optimization Journey
While CloudHealth and Cloudability are effective at delivering visibility into cloud costs—a crucial first step—they largely stop there. Visibility alone, however, isn’t enough in today’s dynamic containerized cloud environments. With nOps, you gain more than just insights; you get automation capabilities making it easy for engineers to act on these insights and keep your cloud spend continually optimized.
In addition to the classic cloud management features offered by CloudHealth and Cloudability, nOps is an all-in-one platform for:
- Managing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans with a 100% utilization guarantee
- Automated Spot management with awareness of your commitments and reliability SLAs matching On-Demand
- Fully automated cloud optimization tasks like resource rightsizing, idle EC2, storage optimization, resource scheduling, etc.
- Support for your native autoscalers (Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter) for better performance at lower costs
- Automated container rightsizing and EKS visibility down to the node or container level
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category — book a demo to find out whether it might fit your organization’s needs.
Let’s briefly compare the features offered by each platform before diving into a more detailed analysis.
| Feature | nOps | IBM Cloudability | CloudHealth |
| Visibility & Cloud Management | |||
| Cost Allocation | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Automated Tagging | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Budget Management | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Automated Reports & Dashboards | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Break down costs by any Kubernetes concept | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Break down costs by any finance concept | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Kubernetes Costs Unified with All Spend | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Role-Based Access Control | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Multi-cloud services | ✖️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Commitment Management | |||
| Recommendations for Reserved Instances & Savings Plans | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Fully automated management of RI & SP | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| 100% Utilization Guarantee | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Spot Management | |||
| Intelligent Instance Selection | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Real-time workload Management | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Spot market awareness | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Commitment awareness | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Cloud Optimization Automation | |||
| Automated Resource Rightsizing | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automatically Eliminate Idle EC2 | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automated EBS Optimization | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automated Resource Scheduling | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Automated GP2 to GP3 | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Advanced EKS Features | |||
| Support for Native Autoscalers (Cluster Autoscaler & Karpenter) | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Visibility down to the Node or Container level | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Container Rightsizing Recommendations | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Container Rightsizing One-Click Apply | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Customizable Thresholds for Container Rightsizing | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Cluster Monitoring & Troubleshooting | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
For a complete comparison of cloud cost optimization platforms across the market, you can check out the full Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Optimization.
1.Visibility and Cloud Management
nOps Business Contexts is a free platform that makes it easy to understand and allocate 100% of your AWS costs, from your largest resources all the way down to your individual container costs.
BusinessContexts+ adds enhanced functionality to simplify the AWS cost reporting process for DevOps, Engineering, FinOps, and Finance teams. With custom reports and dashboards built by FinOps experts, role-based access control, and 40+ filters and views, it’s easier than ever to get the cost insights your organization needs to better understand and optimize your AWS spend, all the way down to the node or container level.
2.Commitment Management
Savings Plans and Reserved Instances offer discounts of up to 72% on all of your AWS compute in exchange for committing to a certain level of EC2 usage. But forecasting commitments can tricky — buying too much leads to waste, but buying too little means you’ll be stuck paying expensive On-Demand prices.
nOps offers a fully automated commitment management solution, so you don’t have to spend time reviewing purchasing decisions or manually managing your discounts and pricing plans. Unique on the market, we offer a 100% commitment utilization guarantee (or we’ll credit you back at the end of the month) so you can be absolutely confident every dollar you spend is working for you.
3.Spot Management
nOps improves Spot instance management over traditional methods by using machine learning to monitor real-time Spot market pricing and interruption trends. The result is better performance at lower costs (plus, huge time savings for engineering teams).
nOps dynamically shifts workloads to the most reliable and cost-effective Spot instances available, diversifying instance types and regions to minimize the risk of sudden interruptions. Unlike typical Spot management, which often replaces instances reactively, nOps proactively rebalances workloads based on predictive insights for more savings and stability.
You can see exactly what you’re saving with nOps — your effective savings, Spot termination rates, cluster cost over time, and other key performance metrics are fully transparent when you log in to the platform.
4.EKS Visibility
Gaining visibility into workloads often requires multiple tools like Datadog, Cost Explorer, and Lens, complicating access to real-time insights on costs, performance, and workloads. For example, Lens provides detailed Kubernetes insights, but it is resource-intensive and requires elevated access and multiple steps to use.
With nOps, this complexity is streamlined. The nOps Kubernetes Dashboard offers Lens-level visibility — including node monitoring, container rightsizing, workload troubleshooting, and binpacking — all in one tooll. Monitor all your workloads in one place, gain a status overview, click into clusters, get insights, explore, and quickly understand what action to take.
5.Cloud Optimization Automation
It’s easy for cloud costs to get out of control without the right processes and tools.nOps Essentials makes it easy to tackle time-consuming cost optimization tasks, with automation tools for resource rightsizing, idle EC2 and EBS cleanup, resource scheduling, one-click GP2 to GP3 migration, EBS snapshot cleanup, and more.
nOps integrates with your preferred monitoring tools (Datadog, CloudWatch, etc.) for high-resolution recommendations that can be implemented in one click.
By making it quick and easy to take action on cost optimization, nOps frees up your engineering team’s time to focus on building and innovating.
About nOps
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $1.5 billion in cloud spend for our customers.
At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize. Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
