Explore the technical overview of cloud cost management software, including architectural design, advanced data analysis, integration capabilities, and selection considerations for optimizing cloud spending.
Developing cloud-based applications can be extremely cost-effective, but without diligent management, costs can quickly spiral out of control.
Cloud cost management software provides the visibility, analytics, and automation capabilities needed to optimize cloud spending.
This article will provide an in-depth technical overview of these solutions, including architectural design, advanced data analysis features, integration capabilities, and considerations for selecting the right toolsets to enable cloud cost efficiency.
Cloud cost management software provides organizations visibility into their public cloud spending and helps them control costs through optimization, governance, and automation. By centralizing billing data across cloud accounts and services, these platforms give finance and engineering teams the insights needed to make informed decisions that align usage to budgets and objectives.
Cloud cost management platforms track cloud expenditure and usage through integration with the native tools of major providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Key capabilities include:
Unlike the native tools offered by cloud providers, independent software centralizes insights across multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure and provides guardrails over self-service provisioning.
Core capabilities of cloud cost management platforms include:
Benefits include increased cost visibility, reduced waste through optimization, controlled spending via governance guardrails, and integration with FinOps processes for long-term efficiency gains. Engineering and finance obtain the insights needed to align cloud usage with business objectives.
Cloud cost management software addresses critical challenges organizations face in the cloud:
With increased visibility, managed overspend risk, controlled resource usage, and better budgetary alignment, organizations can reduce cloud waste and maximize the business value derived from cloud investments.
Cloud cost management software provides development teams visibility into their cloud usage and spending across multiple accounts and services. At a high level, these platforms share common architectural components and data flows:
Usage and cost data is pulled from cloud providers via APIs or billing files. Common collection methods include:
This raw usage data is essential for cost analysis.
The collected raw data lacks standardization across services and accounts. An automated parsing process transforms this data into a normalized format with metrics like:
Normalization enables aggregation and apples-to-apples cost comparison.
The normalized data allows cost management platforms to load usage and cost metrics into a centralized data store or data lake. This serves as the foundation for analytics.
With clean, normalized data, platforms can apply advanced analytics to provide actionable insights, including:
These empower developers to optimize cloud costs.
Usage trends, breakdowns, and recommendations are presented through dashboards, reports and alerts. Common views include:
The visualization layer enables data-driven decisions to control cloud costs.
In summary, cloud cost management platforms share an underlying architecture to collect, process, store, analyze and report on cloud usage and spending data across accounts. This architecture powers cost governance through visibility, analytics and automation.
Cloud cost management tools provide development teams with enhanced visibility and control over their cloud spending. By leveraging automation and intelligence, these solutions can optimize efficiency and reduce waste.
Cloud cost management software offers multi-dimensional visibility into cloud usage and spending trends. Key capabilities include:
With detailed visibility and allocation of cloud costs, teams can proactively optimize their cloud environments.
Armed with rich analytics from cloud cost tools, developers can employ various optimization strategies:
Cloud optimization is a continuous process as usage evolves over time. Automation and intelligence play a key role here.
Cloud governance ensures environments stay secure, compliant, and efficient via:
With centralized cloud governance, organizations can enable self-service provisioning while retaining oversight over usage and spending.
Automating manual processes is key to optimizing cloud efficiency:
By automating cloud management tasks, teams can ensure efficiency even as cloud usage evolves.
With cloud optimization tools and automation, development teams can focus on building applications rather than infrastructure management. Continuous efficiency improvements can fund innovation while controlling costs.
Cloud cost management platforms provide extensive integrations with complementary tools and processes to enable organizations to optimize costs across cloud environments.
Leading cloud cost management solutions integrate bi-directionally with IT service management platforms like ServiceNow to centralize visibility. Key capabilities include:
Besides ServiceNow, cloud cost management also integrates with other IT management platforms such as Flexera One and Turbonomic to connect usage, cost, and performance data.
Cloud cost management integrations with DevOps tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines provide development teams visibility into infrastructure costs. Developers can rightsize resources based on actual utilization.
Integrations with cloud financial management tools like AWS Budgets and Billing Manager enable finance teams to monitor budgets and allocate costs.
Sharing cloud cost analytics and recommendations with FinOps teams allows organizations to:
By providing data-driven insights into consumption, cost management fuels the FinOps cycle of understanding, optimizing, and monitoring cloud spend.
Cloud cost management tools provide visibility into cloud spend across multiple accounts and services. Key capabilities include:
Cost Visibility: Tools aggregate spend from cloud accounts, organize into reports, and provide analytics like forecasting. Leading options include Cloudability, CloudHealth, and CloudCheckr.
Rightsizing Automation: Features that analyze resource usage to recommend and automate scaling, shutdowns or deletions to optimize costs. Kubecost and CloudCheckr offer robust automation.
Policy Enforcement: Applying guardrails over configurations or resource limits and getting alerted on anomalies. CloudHealth and Cloudability enable governance-based policies.
Integrations: Support for data sources beyond the major clouds like SaaS tools, Kubernetes, and on-prem infrastructure. Most connect to 10+ sources but Cloudability touts over 30 native integrations.
The top platforms integrate with all major cloud providers:
Many also support SaaS point solutions like Salesforce, GitHub, and ServiceNow as well as open-source tools like Kubernetes and Terraform.
Most vendors charge based on percentage of cloud spend or per resource monitored. Higher tiers enable more advanced capabilities and better support. For example, CloudCheckr starts at 1.3% of managed spend versus Cloudability at 0.7%.
Cloud cost management software provides development teams with visibility, optimization, and control over their cloud costs. Key capabilities include:
By leveraging these features, organizations can significantly reduce their cloud expenditure through proactive cost governance.
When evaluating cloud cost management solutions, key criteria to consider include:
Data sources: Does the tool integrate with your cloud provider's native cost APIs as well as pull resource consumption data? This enables more granular and accurate cost allocation.
Granularity: Can costs be analyzed at multiple levels - account, service, resource group, tag, application? Greater granularity provides more targeted optimization.
Automation: What policy triggers and actions are available out-of-the-box? The ability to automatically enforce governance policies is critical.
Ease of use: Is the interface intuitive and easy to navigate? Can custom reports and dashboards be configured without coding? Better usability leads to higher adoption across teams.
By assessing solutions against these parameters, organizations can determine the best fit for their cost management requirements now and as cloud usage evolves.
