6 AWS Cost Management Tools to Optimize Your Cloud Expenses
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers top-notch cloud services, but managing costs can be challenging. Depending on your usage, AWS expenses can quickly spiral out of control. Thankfully, AWS provides cost management tools to help you optimize your expenses and boost your cloud infrastructure's efficiency.
These tools enhance cost visibility, track anomalies, simplify financial reporting, and ultimately reduce cloud expenditures while improving performance. To maximize the value of your AWS budget, explore how cloud cost management and optimization tools can benefit your organization. Third-party solutions often provide more features and benefits compared to native tools offered by your cloud provider.
Benefits of AWS Cost Management Tools
AWS cost management solutions empower organizations to monitor and manage their cloud expenses effectively. Here are key benefits and how they can help you save on cloud spending:
1. Cost Visibility
Before reducing your cloud costs, you need a clear understanding of your AWS bills. AWS cost management tools offer greater visibility into your usage, costs, historical spending, and other metrics. These tools simplify generating custom reports, breaking down your AWS spending by regions, cost categories, applications, and more.
2. Monitoring and Alerts
AWS cost management tools provide real-time monitoring and alerts, enabling continuous tracking of AWS expenses.
3. Resource Optimization
Efficiently using AWS resources impacts your cloud spending significantly. Regularly review your cloud environment to match resources with your actual needs. AWS cost management tools identify idle and underutilized resources for optimization, reducing costs and improving efficiency.
4. Buying and selling Reserved Instances
AWS offers discount for Reserved Instances (RIs). These reduce costs compared to on-demand instances. Cost management tools help track and optimize the utilization of these discounts.
AWS Cost Management Tools
Depending on your priorities (cost visibility, monitoring, resource optimization, reporting), various SaaS solutions can support your AWS cost optimization efforts. Here are six tools to help you reduce AWS expenses, along with their key features:
1. SmartCloud in partnership with Zesty
SmartCloud simplifies AWS cost management by automating cloud provisioning. It allows companies to autonomously build, manage, and optimize cloud resources (computing and storage) for maximum cost efficiency. SmartCloud adjusts commitments in real time, aligning with your usage needs and eliminating manual management.
Other similar tools: Cloudkeeper, ProsperOps, CloudCheckr, Apptio Cloudability, Densify, CloudZero, Xosphere
+5 Native AWS Cost Optimization Tools
AWS also offers native tools for cost management, suitable for smaller businesses. Here are additional five AWS native tools to consider:
2. Billing and Cost Management Console
Centralized platform for cost and usage overview, recommendations, invoices, and more.
3. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
Machine learning-powered tool to identify unusual cost patterns.
4. AWS Cost Explorer
Cost analysis and visualization tools with spending reports and cost forecasts.
5. AWS Budgets
Custom spending thresholds and notifications to prevent overspending.
6. AWS Trusted Advisor
Basic guidance on cost optimization, performance, and security.
For comprehensive AWS cost optimization, consider combining native tools with SmartCloud. These tools empower organizations to manage cloud expenses efficiently and improve overall financial performance.