Top 8 Cloud Cost Management Tools To Manage Cloud Costs

The increasing cloud bills are the primary concern for expanding businesses these days. While it’s on the good side if the increase is due to the expansion of innovation cycles, it can be frustrating if it’s due to inactive or idle resources needlessly consuming your AWS spend.

That’s why it’s important for organizations to be aware of their cloud cost structure and relevant metrics to ensure that resources are being used to their fullest potential, and cloud waste is minimized. This is referred to as cloud cost optimization, and it can be achieved with the help of cloud cost management tools. In this blog, we will explore the top cloud cost management tools available to make cloud cost optimization a breeze and a lot more effective than manual checks.

What is Cloud cost management?

Cloud cost management, or cloud spend management, is defined as the concept of effectively managing your cloud expenses to minimize cost and maximize the returns on investment. The process involves tracking, measuring, and regulating cloud spending to find the most cost-effective strategies. It entails cloud cost control for components like memory, storage, network traffic, instances, and more.

Traditionally, cloud cost management was all about cost-cutting and maximizing returns. But, the modern cloud cost optimization approach has made a shift from mere cost-cutting to the optimization of ideal cloud infrastructure per the cloud requirements. The costs and usage are monitored to forecast the needs and the cloud infrastructure.

Benefits of Cloud Cost Management

Not just cloud cost control but cloud management also offers benefits like predictive management, efficient architectural change, and a lot more. Here are the major benefits of cloud cost management you need to know:

• Cost savings: Companies that are proactive in their cloud cost planning can easily avoid overspending and underutilization of resources.
• Predictability: A company that accurately forecasts its cloud computing demands, won’t be caught off guard by a sudden jump in expenses and may even be able to benefit from early bird discounts for the forecasted usage.
• Architectural change: Analyzing spending also aids businesses through optimization of the currently used cloud infrastructure by either making a shift or making the required improvements in the current architecture.
• Efficient Usage: The merits of load balancing, autoscaling, capacity reserving, volume discounts, as well as saving programs, can act as a lifesaver amidst cloud spend management.
• Cost Visibility: In addition to helping with cloud cost management, visibility into your cloud resources and architecture also helps with governance and security.

How to manage cloud costs?

To manage cloud costs, one needs to understand how unit economics work and why exactly it matters during cloud spend management. Simply saying, unit economics would mean determining the change per unit. Now coming to the part about why it would matter; let’s take this through the below-mentioned instance.

The rising costs of cloud infrastructure are not always something to be worried about. For instance, if a company is adding new clients every month, it is typical for their cloud bill to increase. Of course, it is good news, and no one would want to take it fundamentally down. But, what if we say your costs are rising not because of the additions but because of the rise in cost per customer? That is something to be considered. This is where unit economics comes in. As part of the cloud cost control plan, your business needs to track unit cost, COGS, and cost per client. And, for analyzing these parameters, cloud cost optimization tools can play a vital role.

Top 8 cloud cost management tools

There are hundreds of cloud cost optimization tools in the industry to manage cloud costs. But, choosing the most suitable one can add up to business headaches. So, let us help you choose from the best. Here’s the list of the top 8 cloud cost management tools: 

1. nOps

nOps is an automated FinOps platform that specifically caters to AWS customers, helping them reduce their costs by up to 50% on auto-pilot. With nOps, users can benefit in two key ways: First, pay less for what you use without the financial risk. Second, nOps enables you to use less by automatically pausing idle resources.

It offers a range of solutions to help organizations optimize their cloud usage. Its primary offerings include:

• Cloud Management Platform: enables effective cloud management.
• Cloud Visibility: provides dashboards, custom reports, and recommendations for increased visibility.
• Cost Allocation: supports chargebacks, Showbacks, and tagging for cost allocation.
• Risk-free Commitment: offers no-risk/no-commitment EC2 & RDS RI/SPs for optimized cost management.
• nSwitch (Resource Scheduler): automatically pauses idle resources to reduce costs.
• AWS Cloud Migration: maximizes MAP funding, automatically tags resources, and tracks credits for efficient cloud migration.
• Well-Architected Framework Review: automates WAFR assessment & report for optimal cloud architecture.
• Readiness Lenses: supports WAR, FTR, SOC2, HIPAA, CIS compliance assessments for a range of regulations and frameworks.

2. AWS Cost Explorer

The cloud cost optimization service offered by Amazon Web Services is called AWS Cost Explorer. The innovative program can identify unusual spending, identify cost patterns, and even assist in reducing overspending. Finance teams who require a high-level overview of their costs and potential savings opportunities across their whole cloud infrastructure will find this tool most helpful. It’s fantastic for getting started on a small scale, but as teams become more advanced, they frequently struggle to use this as the only source of cloud cost optimization. Additionally, Cost Explorer’s user interface falls short in comparison to other cloud cost optimization tools. 

3. Azure Cost Management + Billing

Azure Cost Management + Billing is like the built-in, native cloud cost management tools that Microsoft Azure provides to measure, analyze, and optimize cloud costs. You receive the necessities, including cost analysis, forecasting, cost monitoring, exporting cost management data, and cost optimization suggestions based on Azure cost management benchmarks. If you utilize Azure and AWS together, the tool also allows you to manage billing information from those two services. But because it’s a native integration and not a premium service, the tool’s features aren’t up to par. 

4. CloudZero

Without needless human tagging, CloudZero as a cloud cost management software delves deep and breaks down expenditures so you can know where, when, and also how your cloud spends its money. Through alerts on Slack whenever cost anomalies emerge, it can help avoid cost overruns. It enables you to obtain real-time cost monitoring for Kubernetes and Snowflake costs across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud systems. The cloud cost intelligence tool puts cloud expenses in the context of your particular business, links engineering and finance, as well as encourages engineers to be more cost-conscious.

5. Densify

To assist you in taking charge of cost optimization, Densify leverages machine learning skills. You can find several cost-saving possibilities and strategies for reducing your cloud computing costs. This cloud cost management software can help you save expenses, spot vulnerabilities, and get alerts if you’re overspending on instances or starting with an ineffective family of instances. Its flexibility to operate in various cloud environments while also optimizing CPU use is a significant feature when practicing to manage cloud costs. Whether running on a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or single-cloud architecture, Densify performs admirably.

6. Spot by NetApp

The modern cloud cost management tool Spot by NetApp is primarily focused on assisting businesses in automating their cloud cost optimizations based on data. Spot offers automatic implementation where typical tools just show opportunities and implementation is done manually, making Spot also a cloud management platform. Based on past usage data, it also aids in predicting spending. However, getting granular visibility into cloud charges requires good tag management, and the prices are only apparent at a daily level of detail. Additionally, the requirement for businesses to permit vendors to autonomously manage internal resources raises security concerns for cloud cost optimization tools. 

7. Harness Cloud Cost Management

Harness is a CICD platform with cloud cost management software that focuses on enhancing cost transparency, optimization, as well as governance. Without the requirement for human tagging, Harness provides cost-effective visibility into your apps, services, and environments. It provides hourly-level transparency into cloud resource costs, categorizing them as used, idle, or unallocated. Additionally, it provides suggestions for surface savings across workloads and the supporting data. However, the platform also lacks crucial cloud automation and optimization features like spot instance utilization, autoscaling, and rightsizing. To fully utilize the product, an organization may also need to undergo a culture shift.

8. Apptio Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability – among the top cloud cost management tools, focuses on assisting users in gaining visibility into their spending, managing it, and ultimately optimizing it. It also assists businesses in visualizing their cost profile throughout a cloud migration. Apptio’s Cloudability provides budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing features as a financial management solution for tracking, reporting, and evaluating cloud costs. The FinOps and finance departments will benefit the most from this tool. However, it is unable to delve deeply into the costs of idle and unallocated resources. Additionally, as cloud cost management software, it is not capable of linking cost changes to engineering changes; it can just perceive cost changes.

Which of these cloud cost management tools is best for you?

Choosing the most appropriate cloud cost optimization tool will depend on a number of factors. For instance, consider your team size, your clientele base, your objectives, your business model, and, of course, the allocated budget. Giving you the option to choose accordingly, nOps offers different subscription and infrastructure models, making it easier for you to choose accordingly. Plus, with cost optimization, it helps you consolidate cloud accounts into a single pricing model, access ongoing visibility for change requests, and manage cloud costs. 
Thus, nOps Cloud Cost Management Tool can be an asset to your business’s cost management. Let us help you save! Book a demo call for nOps today. 

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