As of 2023, 94% of companies use cloud services. Migrating has many upsides. Scaling is more accessible; you can save money by leaving on-prem and have more control.
There is one big con, though (navigating cloud migration difficulties aside):
Managing a cloud environment is a full-time job.
And that’s just one cloud environment! Suppose your company is working with a multicloud environment, optimizing usage and costs, and monitoring output/input while juggling security. In that case, you’re looking at an entire cloud team. Simplify things with cloud optimization tools.
What is cloud cost management?
Cloud cost management is the practice of ensuring your cloud cost budget doesn’t get out of hand. It is a FinOps budget’s best friend, helping you reduce expenses while increasing returns. It does this by tracking resource usage, setting alerts for overspending, and identifying opportunities to save.
Cloud management platforms help companies manage and maintain private, public, multi-cloud single, hybrid, or fully cloud environments.
A typical tool will provide automated dashboards to improve team efficiency and track spend changes and updates. Cloud management and optimization tools appeal to IT and FinOps teams because they help address data breaches and cyberattacks, and they appeal to finance because of how much you can save on budget.
How do you manage cloud costs?
Effective cloud cost management requires ensuring that all tools stay within profitable limits (not as easy as it sounds!). You also need to monitor labor costs to implement optimization suggestions and commitment choices based on market prices.
Then, cloud cost management falls to the wayside because no one has time.
That’s where cloud optimization tools come into play.
How to pick the best cloud optimization tool
Consider the following when reviewing cloud optimization tools:
- Performance monitoring, so no resource is sapping the budget and that all tools perform optimally.
- Clarifying reporting to help you and your team understand where your spend goes when you work in the cloud.
- Bolstering security safeguarding your user data.
- Easy integration with third-party tools or AWS, GCP, Azure, or other cloud platforms.
- Automation of simple tasks to improve team efficiency. You don’t always need to have someone manually do those data pulls!
- Ease of use and a low learning curve so anyone on your team can learn to navigate dashboards and reports.
- Scalability so your cloud management platform can grow with your company.
- Budget-friendly pricing so you can add some dollars back into your yearly budget.
While these are the main benefits we recommend, a great cloud optimization tool will include all of this, plus more.
With that in mind, here are the optimization tools to make your time in the cloud more efficient across all services.
Top cloud management tools
#1: Anodot
With its cloud monitoring tools, Anodot can cut your annual cloud spend in real time by up to 40%. Worldwide, Fortune 500 companies and SMBs use its proactive AI and ML-powered analytics. Anodot’s next-gen alert system makes identifying overspending and saving opportunities easy. Anodot’s cloud cost management customers report an 80% faster problem detection time, a 30% reduction in incident costs, and a 90% decrease in alert noise.
In other words, we make your budget happy because of all the money you save on cloud spend!
As your cloud monitoring tool means you can count on:
- Complete autonomous management makes it easy to detect anomalies, forecast budgets, and receive optimization recommendations in one place.
- Integration with a vast monitoring system that uses easy-to-make personalized dashboards so you can track unit economics and spending without breaking a sweat.
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- FinOps’ expertise eliminates lengthy on-boarding time, so you can start saving ASAP.
- Maximizing your multicloud experience by empowering your team to access and analyze 100% of your data, so the big and little picture always informs your decisions.
- Budget-friendly prices and excellent customer service make it easy for you to grow.
- Identifying and resolving problems before customers even know they exist.
- Total control of your multicloud with a single turnkey solution tool.
With Anodot, you can get personalized FinOps insights to optimize your multicloud, SaaS, and K8s cost vulnerabilities. Take advantage of cost-saving auctions, improve efficiency, and forecast your budget.
Ready to save up to 40% on cloud costs? Request a demo to get started today.
#2: Apache Cloudstack
Apache Cloudstack is a versatile and easily scalable IaaS (infrastructure as a service) source platform. This cloud optimization tool is known for its robust resource provisioning features, cloud configuration automation, VM management capabilities, and easy-to-use API. Its most enormous appeal is how easy it is to build, deploy, and manage cloud service infrastructure.
Cloudstack’s free, open-source version is highly appealing for those looking to get started with cloud optimization tools. Its ability to automate cloud configuration, provide on-demand EC2 setup services, and provide end-user resource provisioning makes it an appealing option. But suppose you’re an enterprise looking for a cloud management tool that will really help you save on budget. In that case, you’re probably better off with Anodot. (Especially if you’re a FinOps organization!)
#3: Apptio Cloudability
A subset of IBM, Apptio Cloudability is one of the best tools to empower your IT, FinOps, and DevOps teams. Its ability to visualize and simplify visibility, optimization, and cloud management is top-notch. Its tools are specially made with FinOps in mind, focusing on cloud spending to help with cost visualization and budgeting.
A big con for Apptio Cloudability is its weaker anomaly detection tools. Its user support and linking cost charges are also weaker than other cloud optimization tools.
#4: AWS Cloudwatch
CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring service that can integrate with over 70 popular AWS services. This cloud optimization tool lets you get in-depth insights into operation health, resource utilization, and performance. Expect customized dashboards, notifications, alarms, debugging resources, and in-depth monitoring and managing features.
That’s not to say there are no drawbacks with CloudWatch. Configuration can be complex, and new users’ learning curve is steep. Though it can monitor on-premises and other cloud services, CloudWatch partners better with AWS.
#5: Azure Management Tools
Azure Management tools is the second most popular cloud service provider (just behind Amazon) for good reason. Expect a complete cloud management suite with tools to help you monitor and manage your cloud infrastructure and applications.
You can use this platform on-premises in Azure cloud or a hybrid environment. Features include infrastructure monitoring, resource provisioning, threat detection, task automation, and app updates. Azure Management tools’ greatest appeal is their ability to unify—get all the necessary tools in one place! Its biggest unappealing feature is its learning curve, which can be daunting, especially for those new to cloud management.
And good news! If you’re looking to beef up your Azure FinOps toolset, Anodot provides advanced anomaly detection so you can easily optimize your Azure cloud finances.
#6: CloudBolt
CloudBolt unites DevOps, IT, FinOps, and SecOps teams with a distinctive framework. It is collaboratively addressing cloud optimization challenges by sharing functionalities. These automated tools aid in governing your cloud platform collectively. Renowned for its user-friendly interface, this platform simplifies tasks ranging from plugin development to server deployment to task decommissioning.
Though CloudBolt is the ideal tool for streamlining processes, it takes work to integrate with other platforms.
#7: CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is a cloud optimization and management tool that provides end-to-end cloud coverage and helps lower costs while improving security, compliance, and cloud resource usages. With this cloud management platform, you can review individual service costs across the entire AWS environment and use that data to forecast future charges. If you use AWS Spot, CloudCheckr offers Spot-focused products like Spot Ocean (Containers), Spot Echo (Cloud Cost Optimization), Spot Elasticgroup (Infrastructure), and Spot Portfolio (CloudOps).
Cloudcheckr’s con is data inaccuracies, as its reports are said to sometimes need to be corrected. It’s also not the fastest tool and has a higher learning curve than other cloud management tools.
#8: CoreStack
CoreStack is an AI-powered next-generation multi-cloud SaaS platform that helps businesses manage the cloud at scale. This cloud management and optimization tool is known for its ease of use, user-friendly dashboards, and cybersecurity detection. Features include cloud-native technology, cost anomaly detection, and cloud cost and compliance recommendations.
CoreStack is not the best integration solution. Reviews speak to CoreStack’s limited ability to interface with other APIs and tools.
#9: Densify
Densify, or Intel Cost Optimizer, will automatically optimize your Kubernetes resources and configure cloud instances. This cloud optimization tool uses Machine Learning to analyze workloads and cloud providers, constantly working to ensure everything is cost-optimized. Its platform can run on multiple cloud services or a multicloud or hybrid environment. Expect alerts for any over-allocation of resources or inefficient utilization of tools.
Common Densify cons include performance issues and low utilization for overly large or wasteful instances.
#10: IBM Cloud Orchestrator
IBM Cloud Orchestrator can be your go-to cloud infrastructure platform. This tool supports quick, secure monitoring, cloud environment backups, and optimization with end-to-end service deployment across platform layers. Key features include cloud usage statistics, extensive dashboards, and configuration automation.
IBM Cloud Orchestrator is known for providing a flexible and consistent cloud integration platform and tools to help you manage your IT stack. This tool’s main drawback is IBM keeps a copy of everything stored in the cloud, meaning if you delete something on your end, IBM will still keep a copy.
#11: Morpheus Data
Morpheus Data is an agnostic cloud optimization platform tool, meaning it helps unify your toolset and standardize your processes across a multi-cloud environment. A flexible and scalable tool, Morpheus Data can integrate with public cloud tools like Azure, GCP, and AWS, with on-prem environments like VM, and even tools like Terraform and ServiceNow.
Built with self-servicing VMs, container-based, and other bare metal application services, this cloud management tool can significantly boost DevOps teams. Some key features include one-click provisioning, FinOps-specific analytics and reporting tools, and automatic logging. Morpheus Data has drawbacks like a clunkier user interface and a steep learning curve, so beginners, beware!
#12: OpenStack
OpenStack is an open-source cloud optimization platform for IaaS (infrastructure as a service). Using APIs or dashboards it helps you govern your networking, storage, and computing resources. Features include fault and service management, networking-as-a-service, object and block storage, VM management, and more.
Since OpenStack is an open-source platform, it’s free! This has the obvious pro of saving budget, though the main drawback is a lack of support since you’re not paying for a product. It also means your team has to be much more hands-on, with the customer support expected with a paid feature absent.
#13: Spot by NetApp
Spot by NetApp is a cloud management and optimization tool for engineering and FinOps teams. Its standout feature is its automation abilities. You can easily automate cost control applications and optimization tools, like container installations. Optimization recommendations are easy to implement. Spot makes identifying cost-saving opportunities to help scale workloads and automate cloud cost control easy.
Spot’s main drawbacks are a lack of resource scheduling guidelines and cost vagueness. Though Spot provides cloud cost granularity for the account and sub-account levels, there aren’t any unified views of multi-cloud costs.
#14: Terraform
Terraform is the ideal cloud optimization and management tool for automation. Known for its ability to automate updates, backups, creation, and more, it’s a great time-saving cloud management tool platform. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code (IaaC) tool that makes it easy to manage and establish clusters across cloud providers, making it a popular DevOps pick. Key features include Kubernetes and remote state management, virtual images, network infrastructure, and the ability to codify and provision multi-cloud architecture.
You can start using Terraform for free, though you can only onboard a small team and access a limited set of tools. Different versions of Terraform, like Terraform Enterprise and Terraform Cloud Business, enable you to scale by letting you onboard larger teams and access more complex environments. Terraform has a steeper-than-average learning curve and requires regular maintenance.
#15: Zesty
Zesty uses an AI model to provide automated cloud cost optimization solutions. It provides precise real-time cloud resource forecasts for CPU cores, storage, and more. It uses these predictions to resize storage volumes or procure or offload public cloud instances.
Zesty’s cloud optimization tool’s primary weakness is that it only covers EC2 instances.
Reduce cloud platform budgets Anodot’s with cloud optimization tools
Determine how much ROI you’re getting from the cloud with an easy-to-use report and data down to the hour – and retention periods up to 18 to 24 months. Anodot’s cloud cost management tools mean your FinOps company can get all the info you need in one place, with one tool. Cloud budget optimization has never been easier.
Anodot works closely with your FinOps team to identify and optimize cloud irregularities. Our tools can integrate seamlessly with your current tech stack, making saving up to 40% on cloud spend easy.
Need proof of concept? Talk to us for more insight into cloud usage, costs, and how much you can save with Anodot’s tools.
Written by Perry Tapiero
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