It’s 2024, and businesses are projected to spend over $1 trillion on the cloud – and yet, where the costs go is still a mystery. Sure, people say that a cloud or hybrid environment is more budget-friendly than on-prem, but what factors increase or, more importantly, decrease your monthly bill? We’ll help demystify things with Microsoft Azure. Read on to learn how one of the largest cloud providers decides what to bill you each month. What is Microsoft Azure? Let’s start with the basics: Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud offering. First appearing on the market in 2010, Azure is one of the big names in the cloud world, punching in at the same weight class as GCP and AWS. Azure’s distinguishing features are its hybrid options, and, of course, easy integration with other Microsoft systems. Azure monthly price Microsoft Azure offers diverse storage, networking, analytics, computing, and more. Below is a table to break down the most common services, their starting prices, and an average working place for a typical workload: Service Priced offering Starting price Example usage Example monthly price Block Blob storage (Hot tier) GB per month $0.02 Storing 500GB in Blob Storage for 1 month 500GB * $0.023 = $11.5 / month Functions Million executions $0.20 Serverless function with 7 million executions each day for 1 month 30 days * 7 * $0.2 = $42 / month Linux virtual machines (VMs) VM hourly usage $0.00 20 VMs used for 1 month 10 VMs * 30 days * 24 hours/day * $0.004 = $57.6 / month AKS (Standard tier) Clusters per hour $0.10 8 million clusters per day for 1 month 30 days * 24 hours/day * 8 * $0.10 = $576 / month Total monthly cost for 20 VMs, a serverless function of 7 million executions per day, and 800GB storage $11.5 + $42 + $57.6 + $576 = $687.1 / month Don’t worry if you find this a bit overwhelming! We’ll go into more detail below. Azure generally offers “pay as you go” prices, though you can get discounts when you commit to one or three years of service. Azure also has a free tier, though services are much more limited, for the first 12 months of some services and ad infinitum for others. What factors inform Azure pricing? Three major factors impact your Azure pricing: Compute Storage Networking More peripherally, other minor factors that impact your pricing include: AI + Machine learning Analytics Blockchain Containers DevOps Developer tools Databases Integration Internet of all things Migration Mixed reality Mobile Web One very important additional feature is Azure’s Security Center. In this age of cyber-attacks, when the cost of cybercrime is expected to exceed $10.5 trillion in 2025, investing some in extra security is always helpful. Azure’s standard tier of Security Center entails Microsoft’s automatic protection of your resources—unless you decide to opt out. Azure pricing models Azure has several different pricing tiers. Don't worry about the cost when you're starting out. Azure offers a free tier for the first 12 months, although the tools you can access are limited. This gives you a risk-free opportunity to explore Azure and see if it's the right fit for your needs. Azure offers a range of pricing models, including pay-as-you-go, spot pricing, and reserved instances. These options give you the flexibility to expand your tools and cloud storage as needed, while still allowing you to commit to a partial price. Azure also breaks down pricing depending on the service you need, with specific pricing models for VM (virtual machine), functions, networking, and storage. Azure free tier Azure has two free tiers: a 12-month and a 30-day free tier. Some services are free indefinitely. The free services you can use indefinitely with Azure are: Development services Development services include Azure app service, Azure DevOps, and DevTest labs. Messaging, routing, and automation Services include event grid, Azure automation, and load balancer. Data management and search Free data management and search services include data factory catalog and cognitive search. Networking Networking services include inbound data transfer (which is unlimited), outbound data transfer (which is limited to up to 15GB), virtual networks (VNets), and data transfer between VNets. Serverless and containers Serverless and container services include service fabric, Azure container instances, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), and Azure functions (accessible up to one million requests). Misc services Additional services include Azure advisor and security center, and active director B2C. 12 month free tier The first free offering lets you use a more limited set of services for free for 12 months. Make sure you stay within the service limit for each of these services, though; otherwise, you’ll be charged fees! For example, you can only use the Windows VM for 750 hours. Service limits are the maximum number of resources or operations you can use in a subscription. They can be hard limits, which means you can't exceed them, or soft limits, which means you can request a limit increase. The services you can use for free for the whole 12 months include: Compute services This service includes Windows VMs and Linux VMs. Database services This includes (but is not limited to) the Azure SQL database (via the Microsoft SQL Server) and the Cosmos DB (which is NoSQL). Storage services Storage services include Azure-managed discs, blog storage, and Azure files. AI & analytics service AI and analytics services include computer vision, translation, personalized services, language understanding in the AI models, and text analytics. 30 day free tier The second free offering allows you to try any services not offered under the free services. If you exceed your service limits for the first free tier, Azure will provide a $200 credit to deduct from your first monthly bill. Be careful when using these free services. You will incur charges if you use any offerings outside of this list. For example, if you're using Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) but want to deploy containers, you will be billed for the VMs and container instances deployed. Pay as you go Azure's pay-as-you-go model enables users to pay according to product usage. This means you're billed for the services you use, down to the second. So, there's no need to worry about a long-term commitment or paying for services you don't use. This might appeal if you still need to commit to a product. It also allows you to up or downscale as required, meaning you can increase or decrease your usage of Azure services based on your needs. This makes it the ideal option for handling unpredictable workloads or when you're not sure how much capacity you'll need. Let’s break down how much each service costs in a pay-as-you-go model: VM pricing There are six Azure virtual machines for you to choose from. Each is divided in terms of use case: General purpose VMs General purpose VM pricing starts at $0.084/hour or $6.1320/month. It’s best for low to moderate baseline CPU usage. If you’re working with lower-traffic web servers, smaller databases, or providing microservices, the lowest-tier Bps v2 series would work well for you. Prices increase per hour and month, depending on your required storage and processing power. For example, the D2ds–D64ds v4 VM’s lowest pricing tier starts at $0.1130/hour or $82.4900/month. Compute optimized Compute-optimized F-series, which features 2-GiB and 16GiB of local SSD temporary storage per CPU core, is the lowest-priced compute-optimized service. Prices start at $0.0497/hour or $36.2810/month. The choice is yours if you manage batch processing, handle web servers, or need support for analytics or gaming VMs. Memory optimized Memory-optimized service pricing starts at $0.1010/hour or $73.7300/month for the E2ps – E32ps v5 (without local temporary storage) offering. This VM service is based on Arm architecture and is known for delivering outstanding performance for high-memory workloads. Disk storage bills separately. Storage optimized Storage-optimized pricing starts at $0.624/hour or $455.5200/month for both the Lsv2-series and the L8as—l80as v3 generation. This offering offers lots of storage and I/O, making it the best pick for big data analytics, data warehouses, or even transactional SQL/NoSQL databases. Graphical processing units (GPU) Graphical processing units (GPU) pricing starts at $0.5260/hour or $383.9800/month for the NCasT4_v3-series. This service provides GPU resources as part of the VM, making it a good choice for AI and machine learning. HPU (high performing computing) High-performance computing (HPC) pricing starts at $0.9040/hour or $659.9200/month for the H-series, designed to handle high-performance computing workloads efficiently. This service includes high-powered distributed CPU resources, making it an excellent pick for big HPC workloads. It also works well for networking like RDMA, which supports high-throughput. The above prices can be subject to change. They're calculated using CentOS/Ubuntu Linux OS and based on East US prices, the 3-year reserved instances, and the saving plan pricing model. Storage pricing There are several different Azure storage options to choose from. Here's a summary of pricing and pros vs cons for a few of the most common: Blob data storage Best used for streaming and storing videos, pictures, documents, or other unstructured data, block blob storage fluctuates in price depending on the amount of data you're looking to store, the operations you're looking to use, and whether you're using any data redundancies options. Both tiers and terabyte usage determine pricing for blob data storage: TB Usage Archive Cold Cool Hot Premium First 50 terabyte (TB) / month $0.00099 per GB $0.0036 per GB $0.015 per GB $0.021 per GB $0.15 per GB Next 450 TB / month $0.00099 per GB $0.0036 per GB $0.015 per GB $0.02 per GB $0.15 per GB Over 500 TB / month $0.00099 per GB $0.0036 per GB $0.015 per GB $0.0191 per GB $0.15 per GB General v1 storage Pricing for general v1 storage works differently. To access tiered storage, you’ll need to upgrade to a general-purpose v2 account, but for now, here’s what you’ll be working with for data storage: Storage Capacity LRS ZRS GRS RA-GRS First 1 terabyte / month $0.024 per GB $0.03 per GB $0.048 per GB $0.061 per GB Next 49 TB (1 to 50 TB) / month $0.0236 per GB $0.0295 per GB $0.0472 per GB $0.0599 per GB Next 450 TB (50 to 500) / month $0.0232 per GB $0.029 per GB $0.0464 per GB $0.0589 per GB Next 500 TB (500 to 1,000) / month $0.0228 per GB $0.0285 per GB $0.0456 per GB $0.0579 per GB Next 4,000 TB (1,000 to 5,000 TB) / month $0.0224 per GB $0.028 per GB $0.0448 per GB $0.0569 per GB   Expect upcharges for large data transfers and snapshots. These prices are specifically for the East US region and can change at any time. Azure SQL database pricing If you need an intelligent, scalable, cloud-based database, Azure SQL database is a solid choice. AI-powered features guarantee performance and durability, and a serverless compute option eliminates scaling concerns. Let’s break it down: Serverless The serverless compute option simplifies performance while optimizing spending. It's best if you're handling a lot of unpredictable usage. The primary replica pricing tier starts at $0.378/vCore-hour and $0.25 per GB per month for storage. Prices vary depending on whether you are using the hyperscale service tier or the general purpose service tier. The above prices are for hyperscale East US. Provisioned Provisioned computing offers a fixed number of resources for a fixed hourly price. Prices vary depending on your service tier and hardware type, starting at $0.366/hour or $266.684/month for the standard-series (Gen 5) vCORE 2 10.2 GB memory option. If you commit to a yearly reserved capacity offering, you can save 35% on pricing; if you commit to a 3-year reserved capacity offering, you can save 55%. [CTA id="82139892-d185-43ce-88b9-adc780676f66"][/CTA] Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) pricing Simplify Kubernetes deployment and management with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). There are three tiers: free (yay!), standard, and premium tier. Free tier Pricing for AKS starts with a free tier. You'll still have to pay for the associated storage, networking, or VM costs, though. The free tier covers a 1,000 AKS cluster node limit. You'll need to pay for nodes if you use them. Standard tier The standard tier charges $0.10 per cluster per hour. This is a good choice for scale or production workloads. You only pay for the nodes that you use, receive one uptime SLA hour, a 5,000 AKS cluster node limit, and API server autoscaling. Premium tier The premium tier is a good choice for mission-critical workloads that require two years of support. Costs start at $0.60 per cluster per hour. If needed, you'll receive one premium support hour, Microsoft maintenance support, and a 5,000 AKS cluster node limit. These above prices are based on the East US location region. Azure functions pricing With Azure Functions, you can get a serverless development experience to support data bindings and event triggers. Like other services, function services come with tier-based pricing. Consumption tier The consumption tier is billed based on per-second resource consumption. Your first 1 million requests and 400,000 GBs of consumption are free. After that, you'll need to pay $0.20 per million executions. Premium tier With this tier, you'll also get enhanced performance and VNET access in addition to the tools you get from the consumption tier. This tier bills based on several core seconds and memory allocation. The pay-as-you-go tier starts at $0.173 vCPU per hour for vCPU duration and $0.0123 GB per hour for memory duration. Spot pricing With spot pricing, you can buy unused computing power, sometimes at a 90% discount (compared to pay-as-you-go prices). But, this does come with the uncertainty of spot instances often being interrupted on short notice. You should only consider this option if your project can tolerate interruptions. Reserved instances Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (RVMI) are region-specific pre-purchased virtual machines lasting one to three years. For the longer commitment, you will receive up to 72% discounts compared to pay-as-you-go Azure pricing. You can replace or cancel reserved instances before the end of the term, though the latter incurs a cancellation fee. If your organization knows what Azure services it requires and in what amounts—and has a settled budget—this option is likely the best for you. *There are many Azure services that we have yet to cover here since we've only discussed the most common. If you want to see more prices or look for different regions of the world, Azure keeps their prices up to date here. Related content: Read our guide to Azure Pricing Backup. Azure saving tricks & tips There are more ways to save on Azure pricing beyond spot purchases or reserved instances. Azure hybrid benefit If your organization owns its own Microsoft license for your on-prem data center, the Azure hybrid benefit is for you. It lets you BYOL (bring your license), meaning you can get your Windows Server or SQL Server licenses to the cloud. So, how does this get you discounts? If you already have a Windows or SQL Server and want to run an Azure VM, your server will track your Microsoft software licensing cost and provide a discount for the VM per hour. This benefit applies to anyone using SQL Server VMs, Windows Server VMs, and Azure SQL Database service. Depending on your version of Microsoft SQL Server or Windows Service, you can get up to 3 years of free security updates (there's no need to extend your license, either!). Azure price matching Azure has pledged to price match equivalent AWS services (EC2 to EC2 services, for example, and Azure Functions to Amazon Lambda), and in keeping with that promise, Azure updated prices every 3 months to stay in line with AWS pricing changes. Azure dev/test rates You’re still eligible for discounts if you don't fit the above categories! If you're using Azure services for development and testing, you can get (a few more honestly) discounts: You can save up to 50% on Logic Apps or 55% on Azure SQL database. You can also get the Microsoft license for free by running Windows VMs for the exact cost of running Linux VMs. Azure cost management Good news – Azure provides cost management tools to help you plan your budget and optimize your user experience. Azure budget This cost management tool ensures that you never exceed budget with any Azure tool. You can get alerts when a feature approaches a set threshold. Azure price calculator Once you know what tools you need, the Azure price calculator is a great resource to determine how much you'll pay. Azure advisor This is an excellent tool for optimization. Azure Advisor provides insights into how you can improve security, performance, cost, and availability. Azure cost analysis This cost monitoring tool breaks down the cost of your various Azure tools. It can help get some granularity for where exactly your money is going. Azure exports This tool lets you export any reports (custom or pre-built) into a CSV file for easy presentation. How to optimize Azure costs like a pro Azure's cost management tools have one (big) drawback: They're provided by the same company as the tool, and the best interest isn't necessarily cost savings but user experience. If you really want tools that can help you break down the cost of working with Azure, providing easy-to-understand dashboards and crystal-precise budget projections, you'll want to use a cloud cost optimization tool. With Anodot’s cost management tool, you can get data down to the hour with retention periods of up to 18 to 24 months. That means all your multicloud and K8 data will be in one place. Other Anodot features include: Real-time Anomaly Detection: Quickly identifies unusual spikes in cloud costs for proactive management. AI-Powered Insights: Provides actionable insights for efficient resource utilization and cost reduction. Multi-Cloud Support: Offers comprehensive visibility and control across different cloud platforms. Customizable Dashboards and Alerts: Enhances understanding and responsiveness with tailored alerting systems. Advanced Forecasting: Utilizes predictive analysis for accurate future cloud spending and budgeting. Anodot demystifies cloud costs for FinOps organizations. With its cloud cost management solution, you can save up to 40% on annual cloud spending. Need proof of concept? Talk to us for more insight into cloud usage, costs, and how much you can save with Anodot’s tools.   See Additional Guides on Key DevOps Topics Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of DevOps. Cloud Cost Optimization Authored by Anodot Top 13 Cloud Cost Optimization Best: Practices for 2024 What Is Cloud Computing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)? The 4 Factors Influencing Cloud Spend & 6 Ways to Optimize It  Continuous Delivery Authored by Codefresh What Is Continuous Delivery and How Does It Work? Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment  Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Integration  Configuration Management Authored by Configu Configuration-as-Code: Principles and Best Practices Configuration Management: What DevOps Teams Need to Know Apple Pkl: Code Example, Concepts & How to Get Started 

Load balancer is a system that distributes network traffic across a group of servers. AWS’s load balancing service is called ELB (Elastic Load Balancing). It automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets like EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. It essentially acts as a traffic cop for your application, ensuring high availability and scalability. What are the features of load balancers?   The main features of load balancers are: Traffic Distribution: Load balancers distribute incoming traffic evenly across healthy targets among your service deployments, thus preventing any single target from getting overloaded. Security: Load balancers secure services and applications with certificate authentication and certificate management. They can also terminate SSL/TLS and thus reduce the service's workload.  Health Monitoring: Load balancers provide real-time health monitoring functionality. They continuously monitor the health of your targets and only route traffic to healthy targets. When a target instance becomes unhealthy, ELB automatically removes it from the rotation until it recovers. Scalability: ELB provides auto-scaling capabilities. It can increase or decrease the instances based on the received traffic. It can also optimize resource usage and allocation and reduce unnecessary wastage or disruption in service. Session Management: Load balancers ensure that subsequent requests from a particular client go to the same server, which is useful for session persistence.  Logging and Monitoring: Load balancers provide logging capabilities that track access logs, which capture detailed information about each request, including client IP address, turnaround time of request, etc. Load balancers integrate with native AWS monitoring services like Cloud Watch for real-time monitoring and alerting.   What are the different types of Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs)?   AWS offers four types of ELBs: Application Load Balancer (ALB): The Application Load Balancer (ALB) routes HTTP/HTTPS traffic and performs advanced traffic management tasks. It operates on the application layer of the OSI model and can handle features like content-based routing, which allows you to direct requests to specific targets based on their content. The context includes URL paths for path-based routing and hostnames for host-based routing. Network Load Balancer (NLB): The Network Load Balancer (NLB) is designed for high performance and low latency. It operates on the transport layer of the OSI model and is suited for handling TCP and UDP-based traffic. It provides ultra-low latency and high throughput, making it efficient for distributing traffic across healthy instances and suitable for applications that require high-performance load balancing. Gateway Load Balancer (GLB): The Gateway Load Balancer (GLB) is a type of load balancer used for deploying third-party virtual appliances like firewalls or intrusion detection systems. It provides seamless integration capabilities for such appliances, thus securing your network from malicious intent. Classic Load Balancer (CLB): AWS provides a legacy load balancer called CLB. While still operational, it is an older-generation load balancer designed for the EC2-Classic network (a legacy network option). It provides basic load-balancing capabilities and operates on both application and transport layers. Note: Using the newer ALB or NLB for most modern applications is recommended. Costs Associated with Load Balancers   Load balancers incur the following types of costs: Usage Costs(Hourly Charge) You are charged per hour for using an Application Load Balancer and a Network Load Balancer. The hourly costs associated with Network Load balancers are generally less than those of Application Load Balancers.  LCU — Lambda Consumption Unit Charges Application Load Balancers also incur costs associated with resource consumption for processing requests. These costs are measured in Lambda Consumption Unit hours. It basically refers to the processing power used to cater to the incoming request load; therefore, it's variable and depends on various factors such as    the number of requests, the size and complexity of the payload, the number of target servers involved, etc. Mutual TLS If Mutual TLS authentication is being used along with an Application Load Balancer, it incurs additional costs. Mutual TLS simplifies authentication management and reduces the load on your applications by enabling the load balancer to negotiate mutual authentication between the client and the server while negotiating TLS. Data Transfer Charges Even though load balancers don’t incur data transfer charges within the same availability zone or VPC, various associated costs can occur if your load balancer is handling servers inside a different VPC. Potentially similar costs can occur between your client application and load balancers spread across multiple availability zones or virtual private clouds.   How to Optimize ELB Costs with Anodot   Anodot is an AI-powered platform that helps you reduce and manage your cloud costs. Some of the benefits of using AWS ELB with Anodot are: Improved Cost Management: Anodot’s platform helps identify ELB usage patterns, which eventually helps identify opportunities to optimize load balancer configurations. Anomaly Detection: Anodot’s AI platform can help proactively detect anomalies in traffic patterns. This helps identify sudden spikes in resource utilization that result in unexpected cost increases. Anodot’s platform enables you to react quickly when such incidents occur and avoid disruption in service and unwanted costs. Notifications and Alerting: Anodot provides capabilities for automated alerts and notifications for certain system incidents. This enables you to address issues promptly and minimize downtime.  Application Monitoring: Anodot’s platform provides much more advanced monitoring capabilities than native ELB monitoring tools. This provides deeper insights into application performance and identifies potential bottlenecks.   Some FAQs? Some common FAQs about load balancing: What is load balancing? Load balancing is distributing traffic and computational workloads among multiple servers in a system.   What are the different types of load balancers in AWS? AWS offers four types: Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, Gateway Load Balancer, and Classic Load Balancer. Where is load balancing generally used? Load balancers are generally used in web applications. They distribute traffic among multiple servers of a front-end or back-end application, which can be some backend API or a server-side rendering of a front-end application. It is essential to manage a large incoming load and uniformly distribute it among various servers so that we never face crashes or downtime in service.  

We're back with this year's cloud cost report. This time around, we're mixing things up a bit. Don't worry. You'll still get an in-depth look at cloud cost in the FinOps industry, but you'll get more insights with our data-driven results from leading reports and Anodot's customers. If you're already reaching out to grab that report, you can find it here. If you're interested in a sneak peek, here's a quick preview of what our 2024 report has in store. Current Trends in Cloud Costs What should FinOps expect this year? Top industry leaders share their insights on the 2024 cloud cost landscape. FinOps Foundation 2024 State of FinOps Report For the first time, reducing waste and managing commitments have emerged as the primary priorities for FinOps practitioners across all spending tiers. Nearly half of the practitioners highlighted the need for organizational alignment and executive buy-in to tackle their challenges effectively. Prioritizing automation has become one of the top three focus areas across all spending tiers. Organizational focus is directed towards improving budget granularity, communication, forecast accuracy, and budget adherence, with almost 57% of respondents seeking enhancement. The impact of AI/ML costs on FinOps practices is becoming evident, with 31% of all respondents and 45% of large spenders ($100M+ annual cloud spend) acknowledging its influence. Challenges include the rapid escalation of AI costs, allocation of shared AI expenses, and correlating AI costs with business outcomes. Flexera  2024 State of the Cloud Report Optimizing current cloud usage and transitioning more workloads to the cloud are high priorities for organizations across all usage levels. Managing cloud expenses has emerged as a significant challenge, surpassing security concerns. While the self-reported wasted cloud spending on IaaS and PaaS has decreased to 27% from a peak of 35% in 2022, only half of organizations have a dedicated FinOps team for cloud cost optimization. Despite economic uncertainties, cloud cost optimization precedes most organizations' sustainability. A large percentage of respondents, 85%, utilize GenAI cloud services to varying extents, with 25% extensively, 38% in experimental stages, and 22% using them sparingly.  Intel Granulate State of Cloud Optimization 2024 report In 2024, the primary objective is prioritizing cloud spend management, followed by security and compliance. Many teams need to regularly review their cloud expenditures, with nearly half of respondents reporting quarterly or annual reviews, at 30.5% and 16.7%, respectively. Installing microservices leads to increased costs, with containers and Kubernetes identified as the most expensive and challenging-to-optimize workloads. So, what patterns are we seeing from these reports? In 2024, the FinOps team will prioritize cloud spend management, security, and compliance. Many teams need to regularly review their cloud expenditures, and adopting microservices leads to increased costs, with containers and Kubernetes identified as the most expensive and challenging-to-optimize workloads. Identifying current trends can be an eye-opener, showing what your FinOps colleagues prioritize in the cloud. Now that you know what to prepare for, how can you optimize for success? We'll show you what our customers are doing!   How Anodot Customers Maximize Their Cloud Investments Giving tips on managing cloud costs is one thing, but when you’ve got real data to back it up, that's what counts! Here’s how our customers are cutting down their cloud expenses. Controlling Cloud Spend Anodot customers are witnessing a trend to brag about: their cloud footprint is expanding, yet their monthly expenditures are consistently declining! How? This happens because our clients actively use advanced platforms to give clear advice on using the cloud better and save money simultaneously. These tools don't just aim to reduce expenses; they empower businesses to extract maximum value from the cloud. They facilitate timely, informed decisions and instill a culture of financial accountability. Impacts As a result, even as these customers scale up their operations and migrate additional workloads to the cloud, they're achieving a notable reduction in their cloud costs, seeing a consistent downward trend month over month and year over year. Cloud usage & cost optimization As mentioned before, a key goal for FinOps in 2024 is to optimize cloud usage and costs. This means smartly designing infrastructure to maximize efficiency. Anodot revealings When analyzing cloud usage and cost data, Anodot's AI engine generates recommendations for workload and rate optimization. In 2022, workload and rate optimizations were equally prevalent in recommendations, but by 2023, workload optimizations took the lead, constituting over 90% of recommendations. Impacts Anodot's AI engine significantly shifts towards workload optimizations; companies implementing FinOps must focus more on designing efficient infrastructures. This indicates a move towards smarter cloud management strategies, ensuring that resources are used more effectively, ultimately leading to cost savings and enhanced operational efficiency. Realized savings opportunities Anodot users looked for ways to cut costs without losing the benefits they get from their cloud investments. The Numbers 2022 witnessed the completion of about 60% of the recommendations, which soared to nearly 90% in 2023, marking a significant 55% increase! Impacts There's a clear shift happening where the main focus is now on cutting down waste and managing commitments better. These have become the top priorities for FinOps practitioners at every spending level. Most impactful optimizations Which of our customers followed our advice for efficient cloud operations? In 2023, FinOps practitioners put over 90% of Anodot's optimization tips into practice. 5 most implemented optimizations Ebs-unattached, ec2-stopped-instance, ip-unattached, ebs-outdated-snapshot, and cloudtrail-duplicate-trails were the top optimizations by FinOps practitioners, making up nearly half of all completed optimizations. Ebs-unattached was the most impactful, contributing to over half of the savings, a significant increase from 33.75% last year. The other top optimizations accounted for less than 13% of total savings. Impact These results show that zeroing in on certain tweaks, like dealing with unattached EBS volumes and shutting down EC2 instances, can really cut down organizational costs. It’s pretty eye-opening that the unattached EBS volumes accounted for more than half of the savings, showing how much money these optimizations can save. This also points to a growing trend of getting savvy with FinOps practices, especially since we’re seeing more savings from these optimizations than last year. Companies focusing on these areas can manage their cloud resources and costs way more effectively. Looking Ahead: Predictions for Cloud Costs So, what's next for cloud tech and FinOps? Here's a quick look at our thoughts and what our customers are saying about the latest in managing cloud costs. Anodot's perspective After reviewing our customer's data and the opinions of top experts, we think the future of managing cloud costs will definitely involve AI innovations and a few challenges.  Our viewpoint We expect business leaders in 2024 to prioritize predictability in the face of economic uncertainties. They are turning to accurate forecasting and strict budget adherence to stabilize variable cloud spending. The evolution of AI-powered FinOps is opening new opportunities through chat-based assistants and analytics, elevating maturity, and addressing talent challenges. Despite facing AI/ML cost rises, cloud inflation, and resource scarcity, the need to optimize cloud costs and automate code with human oversight is becoming more critical amidst global chip shortages. Our partners' perspective  CyberArk predictions AI-driven FinOps is set to shape cloud decision-making by leveraging data insights and automation. It will be crucial to integrate FinOps with key roles like Architect, Sales, and Security. Automation will streamline data collection and enhance day-to-day FinOps tasks. Organizations will prioritize business continuity, with FinOps becoming a non-functional requirement akin to security and compliance. Aligning FinOps with efficient resource utilization and security will be vital for a comprehensive solution in the evolving operational landscape. Terasky predictions Gen-AI and FinOps are set to revolutionize infrastructure management, enhancing cloud efficiency. The evolution of FinOps necessitates more maturity in its operational phase, while Gen-AI is poised to assist companies in implementing best practices for new workloads. A comprehensive approach involving a mix of tools and solutions is vital for efficient FinOps services. Platforms are expected to offer automated processes that drive recommendations into action. Collaboration with a solutions integrator can further optimize cloud operations and enhance key performance indicators.   Get our in-depth analysis and what our partners think about FinOps future in our report! Final thoughts 2024 is shaping up to be a big year for FinOps and cloud tech. With Gen AI on the rise, companies are getting a clearer picture of their spending than ever before. With that in mind, monitoring often gets overlooked, so definitely make it a priority in your use. (There's a lot of money to be saved!) From what we've seen, our customers are making proactive steps on FinOps based on our insights and recommendations. Our platform focuses on reducing unnecessary cloud costs and streamlining operations; our data supports this! Woo! Remember its just a quick snapshot, though! Our full report dives deep into our data, offers forecasts from our customers, and highlights the must-knows from the latest FinOps reports. Check it out and here's to a fantastic 2024 in the cloud!

Network Address Translation Gateway or NAT Gateway is a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services(AWS) that allows instances in a private Subnet within a Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) to connect services outside the VPC. NAT ensures that even though your instances can connect to the outside world, outside services can't establish a direct connection with them. It's a tool that secures the instances, simplifies network architecture, and reduces administrative overhead.   What are the connectivity types of NAT Gateway? There are two connectivity types of NAT Gateways: Public NAT Gateway: This is the most common type. It allows instances in a private subnet to connect to the Internet but cannot receive unsolicited inbound connections from the Internet. Private or NAT Gateway for VPC Peering: This type of NAT Gateway facilitates communication between resources in your VPC and resources in a peered VPC that does not have a public internet gateway. How does NAT Gateway work? NAT Gateway works as follows: In a typical cloud setup, you have public and private subnets within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Instances in the private subnet don't have direct internet connectivity. When an instance in the private subnet needs to access the internet (e.g., to download updates, connect to external APIs, or retrieve data), it sends the outbound traffic to the NAT Gateway. The NAT Gateway translates the private IP addresses of the instances in the private subnet to its public IP address. This means that internet resources see the traffic coming from the NAT Gateway's public IP address rather than the private IP addresses of the instances. After the translation, the NAT Gateway forwards the traffic to the internet. When the internet resources respond to the outbound traffic, they send the responses back to the NAT Gateway. The NAT Gateway receives the responses, translates the destination IP address back to the private IP address of the originating instance, and forwards the response to the instance in the private subnet.   Costs Associated with NAT Gateways NAT Gateway incurs two types of costs: Usage Costs(Hourly Charge): You are charged per hour that a NAT Gateway is provisioned and available in your VPC, regardless of whether it's actively processing traffic. The price varies depending on the AWS region of your NAT Gateway. Data Processing Charge: You are charged for every Gigabyte (GB) of data that passes through the NAT Gateway. This includes outbound traffic from your private instances to the internet and any return traffic generated in response to those outbound requests. [CTA id="89ea4e30-a9b9-468c-959d-cc70c06293e3"][/CTA] What are the benefits of NAT Gateway? The benefits of NAT Gateway are as follows: Public Internet Access: NAT Gateway allows resources within private subnets to access the Internet for tasks such as downloading updates, accessing external APIs, or fetching data without exposing their private IP addresses to the Internet. Improved Security: NAT Gateways allow you to keep your instances in private subnets within your VPC anonymous. This isolates them from the public Internet, significantly reducing the attack surface for malicious actors. Only authorized outbound traffic can flow through the NAT Gateway, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access to your resources. Simplified Management: NAT Gateways eliminate the need to provision, configure, and maintain your own NAT instances. This simplifies your network architecture and reduces your administrative overhead. AWS manages the underlying infrastructure and ensures its availability and scalability. Scalability: NAT Gateways can automatically scale up or down based on your instances' outbound traffic demands. This ensures that your NAT Gateway can handle traffic spikes without performance degradation. You don't need to adjust resources to meet changing demands manually. Cost-Efficiency: While there are costs associated with NAT Gateways (hourly rate and data processing), they can sometimes lead to cost savings compared to alternative solutions. For example, if your instances only require outbound connections to specific AWS services, NAT Gateways might be more cost-effective than using individual Elastic IP addresses for each instance. High Availability: AWS NAT Gateway is designed to be highly available, with built-in redundancy across multiple availability zones (AZs). This ensures that your outbound internet traffic remains uninterrupted even in a failure in one availability zone. Monitoring and Logging: AWS provides monitoring and logging features for NAT Gateways, allowing users to track outbound traffic patterns, monitor usage, and troubleshoot connectivity issues effectively. This visibility helps in optimizing resource usage and identifying potential security threats.   FinOps for NAT Gateways FinOps is an operating model that brings financial accountability to variable spending in the cloud. It ensures that cloud costs are aligned with a company's business objectives. Implementing FinOps principles can help optimize costs associated with using NAT Gateways. With Anodot, FinOps teams can easily classify and divide all their cloud costs by business structures like apps, teams, and lines of business using business mappings.   Anodot helps identify and allocate the shared costs of different business departments in a company. Its business mappings help split the shared-costs across different departments using FinOps models. Such as: Even split: the targeted costs are split evenly among all departments. By percentage: the targeted costs are split by custom percentages. Proportional: the targeted costs are divided based on the relative percentage of direct costs.   Anodot empowers FinOps teams to: Boost engineering trust in NAT Gateway spending by providing clear data and insights. Pinpoint, which gateway is acting as a cost center. Track overall cloud costs across different business areas over time. Find unallocated gateway costs to optimize budgeting. Simplify cost allocation for clear accountability (showback) and cost recovery (chargeback). Make strategic investments based on accurate data.   How to Optimize NAT Gateway Cloud Costs using Anodot? Anodot Cloud Cost is a valuable tool for identifying and reducing idle resource problems associated with your AWS NAT Gateways, ultimately optimizing your cloud spending. Anodot can be leveraged in the following ways to optimize NAT Gateway costs: Identifying Idle NAT Gateways: Anodot leverages machine-learning algorithms to analyze your NAT Gateway usage patterns. It can identify provisioned NAT Gateways but not actively process significant outbound traffic. These instances are idle and accumulate usage costs but not data processing costs. Such instances can be terminated if found redundant. Visualization and Alerting: Anodot provides insightful dashboards and visualizations that display your NAT Gateway usage metrics over time. You can easily see which NAT Gateways are experiencing low traffic and potentially incurring unnecessary costs. Anodot can also be configured to send alerts when a NAT Gateway exhibits a sudden drop in traffic or falls below a predefined utilization threshold. This allows you to take proactive action and optimize resource allocation.   Recommendations and Insights: Anodot uses ML analysis to provide tailored recommendations for optimizing your NAT Gateway usage. For example: Right-sizing your NAT Gateways: If you're using a larger NAT Gateway than necessary for your traffic volume, Anodot might recommend downsizing to a smaller, more cost-effective option. Scheduling on/off times: If your application has predictable usage patterns with off-peak hours, Anodot could recommend automating the creation and deletion of NAT Gateways during those times. This allows you to pay only for the time you need the resource. Exploring alternative solutions: Anodot might identify situations where alternative solutions like VPC endpoints could be more cost-effective for specific outbound traffic needs.   How does Anodot allocate NAT Gateway costs? The majority of the cost management tools provide filtering and grouping capabilities that combine multiple filters and tags into a category and use that as the basis for cost allocation, this results in overlapping costs, which leads to inaccurate reporting. To tackle this issue, Anodot provides the capability of business mapping that empowers you to: Accurately map spending data to relevant business dimensions without overlap Assign shared costs equitably Report cloud spend in a way that is customized to your organization’s needs Anodot allows you to allocate NAT Gateway costs to specific departments, projects, or applications within your organization. This cost allocation helps you track spending more granularly and identify areas for potential cost optimization across your cloud infrastructure. Anodot’s cost allocation tools provide comprehensive reports that detail your NAT Gateway usage and related costs. These reports can be used to monitor your progress in cost optimization efforts and make informed decisions for future resource allocation.

As of 2023, 89% of companies rely on a multi-cloud approach. Operating in the cloud is no longer a plus but a competitive necessity. Migrating from a fully on-prem to a hybrid or fully cloud environment isn’t exactly easy though, especially given the impenetrability of cloud data.  Cloud monitoring enables your company to be proactive about its cloud services, ensuring that availability, security, performance, and other aspects are all up to par before reaching the end-user. This is part of a series of articles about Cloud Management What is cloud monitoring? Cloud monitoring involves overseeing cloud-based processes and optimizing workflow for cloud infrastructure. DevOps teams rely heavily on this procedure, which can be automated or done manually to ensure that all tools perform optimally.  What is cloud monitoring? Cloud monitoring is done with cloud monitoring tools, which take snapshots of your performance so you can better understand KPIs like CPU usage, network traffic, application performance, and more. This process relies heavily on observability, which is a practice that entails observing a system’s outputs to understand its internal processes. Cloud performance visibility is hard to achieve without cloud monitoring tools, and understanding how you might optimize cloud costs, improve efficiency, or even address security issues is difficult at best.  How to pick the best cloud monitoring tool for your company Getting started with cloud monitoring can be intimidating, so use our criteria when reviewing the best tools for your company: Cloud monitoring tool cost vs ROI. The more you use the tool, the more it will cost. Make sure it pays for more than itself so you’re still making a profit.  Ease of use. Pick a tool that prioritizes user-friendliness so anyone in your department can improve their understanding of cloud costs.  Consolidation. Cloud monitoring tools should store all of your data in an easy-to-reach place to simplify things.  Automation. The majority of cloud monitoring tools offer automatic alerts when spending gets too high. So when looking at automation features, make sure your tool of choice also reviews better cloud prices so you can save money.  Always test your tool. Let’s repeat: ALWAYS test your alerts to ensure your cloud monitoring tool performs optimally! You don’t want to miss a fire drill because the tool wasn’t properly established!  What kinds of cloud monitoring tools are there? There is a diverse variety of cloud monitoring techniques. The most common are:  Application performance management (APM).  Cloud cost monitoring.  Built-in monitoring.  Cloud security monitoring.  Database monitoring.  Cloud infrastructure monitoring.  Open-source monitoring.  We’ll explain a few of these in more detail. It’s vital to pick the tool that best fits your company, as some monitoring tools are better suited for FinOps vs healthcare for instance, and tech stack.  Top 20 best cloud monitoring tools by category Why are cloud cost monitoring tools so important? In 2021, over $26 billion in public cloud resources were wasted, and a big reason for that is that many organizations needed to be made aware of how their cloud setup was spending their money. Lack of understanding of cloud usage leads to confusion about ROI and how to optimize spending. That’s why cloud cost monitoring tools can be a lifesaver for reducing cloud waste and helping you reduce costs.  #1 Cloud cost monitoring tool: Anodot With its cloud monitoring tool offerings, Anodot has helped clients save up to 40% on annual cloud spending. Its proactive AI and ML-powered analytics are used by Fortune 500 companies and SMBs worldwide. Overall, Anodot's customers report an 80% faster problem detection time, a 30% reduction in incident costs, and a 90% decrease in alert noise. There’s really no question that you’re in the hands of experts when you use this cloud monitoring tool! Using Anodot as your cloud monitoring service means you can count on: Integration with a vast monitoring system for easy-to-make personalized dashboards to track unit economics and spending.  Maximizing your multicloud experience by accessing and analyzing 100% of the data you collect so you can identify problems and act on opportunities sooner.  Budget-friendly prices and excellent customer service to help you optimize and grow.  Complete autonomous management and control of your multicloud with a turnkey solution, making it easy to detect anomalies, get recommendations, and forecast budgets in one place. Identifying and resolving problems before customers even know they exist. FinOps expertise to eliminate lengthy on-boarding time to help you save ASAP.  Anodot prioritizes personalized FinOps insights that help optimize your multicloud, SaaS, and K8s cost vulnerabilities while taking advantage of cost-savings auctions, improving efficiency, and forecasting your budget. They also know the importance of real-time alerts and incorporate next-gen level intelligence  Ready to save up to 40% on cloud costs? Request a demo and get started today.  #2 Cloud cost monitoring tool: AWS Cost Explorer AWS Cost Explorer makes it easy to visualize your cloud spend and usage. Expect an easy-to-use interface that lets you display your AWS cost and usage overtime at the click of a button. These insights make it easier to analyze data, address cost spikes, and improve budgeting.  A noteworthy feature? You can filter historical data up to 30 months to predict future costs. Users also have access to AWS marketplace, where you can easily integrate with tools like Anodot!   Before you commit though, know that AWS Cost Explorer does have the notable con of delayed cost data and lack of real-time reporting.  #3 Cloud cost monitoring tool: Xosphere Xosphere supports any language, platform, or containers like Kubernetes, EKS, ECS. This self-hosted subscription tool scans your stack continuously to help you always utilize the most cost-efficient tools. Xosphere also automatically helps move apps from on-demand to spot or vice versa to improve reliability. Xosphere’s only drawbacks are that it can be prone to API bugs and lacks backward integration.   Built-in monitoring tools Built-in monitoring tools benefit from native integration since they’re already embedded with your cloud platform. This typically means these tools will be easier to use and troubleshoot, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce costs. However, their efficiency on data pulls and dashboards is usually not as robust as that of other alternatives on the market.  #4 Built-in monitoring tools: AWS Cloudwatch AWS CloudWatch monitors the health of your AWS applications, infrastructures, networks, and services. It provides automatic updates in response to changes in performance or spending to help optimize resource use. It has two levels of monitoring abilities: basic and advanced. Basic is free and measures seven pre-selected metrics and three metric status checks at five- and one-minute intervals. Advanced has different tiers depending on how much you wish to pay. It starts with measuring 10,000 metrics at $0.30 per metric per month, with the cost decreasing with the more metrics you wish to measure. Also be aware of AWS CloudWatch’s notable con of limited metric storage and limited custom metrics visibility, as well as a steeper than normal learning curve. #5 Built-in monitoring tools: Google Cloud Operations Formerly known as Stackdriver, Google Cloud’s operations suite provides logging, monitoring, and trace-managed services for Google Cloud offerings and more. It includes real-time log analysis and management, stand-alone managed services for Prometheus, built-in metrics that allow you observability at scale, and Application Performance Management that helps you improve performance and overall cloud platform health. Google Cloud Operations has integrations with a vast array of other cloud monitoring tools, including Anodot.  The main drawback to working with Google Cloud Operations is cost. Google Cloud Operations charges by the amount of data absorbed, not the amount of data stored. Its pricing structure is also more complex than the other tools on this list, making it hard to accurately estimate cloud costs.  #6 Built-in monitoring tools: Microsoft Azure Monitor Microsoft Azure Monitoring makes it easy to analyze cloud data for your Azure platform and other on-prem or cloud resources. It aggregates data from your tech stacks and offers solutions to help optimize performance and integrates smoothly with various APIs, external tools like Anodot, and systems, enhancing its versatility. Certain features are free, but if you want to use the full potential of this tool, you’ll need to use Azure Monitor’s tiered pricing structure. Azure Monitoring isn’t known for its notification channels or application level resource monitoring, so keep scrolling if those are at the top of your must-have list.   Cloud security monitoring In 2023, global data breach costs rose to nearly $4.5 million. Ensuring user data is well protected is paramount, especially if you work in a high-security sector like FinOps. Here are our recommendations for the top cloud security monitoring tools of 2024:  #7 Cloud security monitoring tools: Orca Security If you’re looking for an agentless cloud security and compliance tool to deploy for your Kubernetes, Azure, GCP, or AWS services, it would be hard to go wrong with Orca Security. An expert at protecting multi-cloud environments, this cloud security tool will be a huge lift for your cybersecurity. Expect monitoring, analysis, and reports on suspicious malware or other vulnerabilities. You’ll also only receive alerts for actual fire drills, like critical security or compliance problems, not just for any minor issue. Orca Security has been known for having some coverage gaps, with agent-based solutions sometimes covering less than 50% of assets.  #8 Cloud security monitoring tools: PingSafe Prevent cloud credential leakage while addressing system vulnerabilities and upholding regulatory compliance with PingSafe. Using world-class white hat hackers, PingSafe designed a  full-stack Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) to bolster cloud security. Able to improve cloud infrastructure performance and in doing so, improve organizational visibility, PingSafe’s platform is a great solution if you want to bolster your cloud security and efficiency.  With a pay-as-you-use pricing model, PingSafe offers cloud scalability and performance you can count on, and integrations with Slack, JIRA, and more. Its biggest drawback is you’ll have to wait with the rest of us on their still-pending premium features.  #9 Cloud security monitoring tools: Wiz Having helped companies of all industries and sizes address cloud vulnerabilities and defend against malicious activity, Israeli-based Wiz is known for its cloud security ability for good reason. Wiz uses APIs to connect to all major cloud providers. It is an agentless cloud security platform, and offers continuous misconfiguration analysis, virtual machine scans, serverless functions, and more, all while revealing any risks to your cloud platform.  Wiz’s cloud security platform, Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), focuses on improving visibility, risk prioritization, and business agility on its fully integrated platform. Comprehensive features include CSPM, IaC scanning, container security, code security, CDR, and more. For all its pros, Wiz can have a confusing user interface, so it’s not the best to those new to cloud monitoring tools.   Database monitoring Database monitoring means continuously overseeing and analyzing your database's performance. Namely, it prioritizes the health and activity to improve performance and cost-effectiveness. The benefits of this technique include reviewing processes, queries, consumption of cloud database resources, and availability.  Top database monitoring tools include:  #10 Database monitoring tools: SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer tools monitor and optimize DBMS (database management systems) for your cloud, hybrid, or on-prem setup.Its cross-platform support simplifies anomaly detection and spend optimization, while its detailed dashboards offer a comprehensive view of database performances down to the second. With SolarWinds, you can monitor anything from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, MySQL, SAP ASE, Aurora, MariaDB, and more, making it easy to identify inefficient workloads and improve costs. SolarWinds has a higher price tag than other tools on this list, and its dashboards can be overwhelming for first-time users.  #11 Database monitoring tools: Redgate Known as one of the best SQL monitoring tools for databases, Redgate SQL Monitor is the tool to improve your SQL server’s performance. It’s ideal for database administrators who want a tool that can provide database-specific performance, security monitoring, and availability data. Deployable for on-prem or cloud-based platforms, Redgate gathers real-time data to help you monitor your dashboards while safeguarding your customer data. Redgate’s biggest cons are its cost, which is notably steeper than other tools on this list, and its lack of updates and customer support.  #12 Database monitoring tools: Datadog Datadog is a go-to database monitoring tool, providing monitoring, security, and analytics dashboards suited for IT, security engineers, business users, and developers. You’ll get access to over 500 real-time data sources.  With infrastructure automation, log management, and application performance monitoring, users easily track spending changes and anomalies to optimize budget and pinpoint problems. Datadog does have the drawback of no automatic device detection or standardized reporting.   Application performance monitoring (APM) Application performance monitoring (APM) tools help you see software application problems before they cause disruption in your cloud. Top tools provide real-time application performance monitoring data to make it simpler to diagnose and troubleshoot issues. Our top APM tools are:  #13 Application performance monitoring tool: AppDynamics This cloud-native platform supports real-time APM. This tool supports over six programming languages and enables you to visualize and report on application performance insights at the code level. AppDynamics also identifies application topologies automatically, and troubleshoots slow response times., Using this Cisco-centric platform means your business can upscale your digital strategy, as AppDynamic’s full-stack perspective means end users can quickly identify and address issues. Expect fully optimized performance and customer experience. The biggest cons of this cloud monitoring tool are its limited native integration and less-than-friendly user interface.  #14 Application performance monitoring tools: New Relic New Relic is the perfect tool for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing any environment, from mobile to cloud to on-premise. This tool empowers engineers and upscales their ability to plan, build, and deploy software. Expect a modern full-stack platform that supports microservices, logs, traces, synthetics, and multi-cloud resource monitoring. Its Grafana Dashboards can also display specific method calls for apps of any size.  New Relic offers a free plan to help decide if its platform suits your use case. Before you commit to a (free!) plan though, know that the paid New Relic plan can be pricey and has been said to have some Python agent memory leaks that can resort in resource hogging.  #15 Application monitoring tools: Sumo Logic Sumo Logic is our go-to cloud application monitoring tool if you need a log-focused platform. Its  LogReduce lets you group similar messages, and LogCompare lets you compare logs from any time period. These toolsets make it easy for your team to run analyses and address performance issues.  Sumo Logic also has built-in security abilities, and supports Privacy Shield, PCI DSS 2.3, and SOC 2 Type 2. It has a free trial version, making it easy for your team to see if it's the right fit for your needs. This tool is known for its visuals and how easy it is to set up, but it can have some issues with speed when running large queries or loading dashboards.   Cloud infrastructure monitoring Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools help you monitor the health of your cloud platform and address any misconfigurations. Typically, these tools include information on workflows and workloads, security posture, networks, application metadata, and more. Our top cloud monitoring tools in this area include:  #16 Cloud infrastructure monitoring tool: Dynatrace Dynatrace provides a full-stack interface that enables your cloud apps, infrastructure, and logs, all with a user-friendly interface. It's beneficial for app performance monitoring, user tracking, and primarily, infrastructure and is available as on-premise and software as a service. Powered by AI, Dynatrace helps simplify cloud complexity by enabling auto-discovery of VMs, cloud services, containers Kubernetes, hosts, and more.  Dynatrace is known for its support for advanced log analysis, usability, and problem-solving features that increase troubleshooting efficiency. However, it can be overwhelming to first-time users, and pricing information is not available until you sign up for the platform. Its business metrics analysis is also not as robust as Datadog or AppDynamics.  #17 Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools: PagerDuty PagerDuty is known for its automation offers. With features like on-call management, automated incident responses, process automation, and intelligent, self-growing machine learning, it’s the ideal hands-off platform that lets developers focus on their coding. If you need a tool that gives more breathing room for your DevOps and IT team, PagerDuty is a solid choice. Its ability to support your cloud infrastructure via automated processes is ideal for hands-off optimization and growth. With that said, PagerDuty does have limited customization in comparison to other tools on this list, and some of integrations can be outdated, or even broken.  #18 Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools: DX Unified Infrastructure Manager DX Unified Infrastructure Manager offers full-stack observability with zero-touch configuration and open architecture for monitoring your public and/or hybrid legacy data centers or infrastructures. This feature is extremely rare and extremely valuable. Known for its scalability and optimized end-user experience, it’s hard to go wrong with this cloud infrastructure monitoring tool.  There are a couple of drawbacks, though. Namely, DX Unified Infrastructure Manager lacks third-party integrations. Its dashboards, while robust, can be overwhelming for first-time users, especially with all of the customization options.   Open-source monitoring If you can’t justify the costs of cloud monitoring tools, open-source monitoring is a low-cost, no-lock-in option. For the lower cost, there will be more on-the-ground work. Full support often comes with a fee, but open-source monitoring can help learn how much cloud monitoring can help your company.  #19 Open source monitoring tool: Grafana As one of the most popular open-source cloud and self-managed monitoring stacks and data visualization tools, Grafana is a good place to start collecting data for the low cost of free. You can monitor any stack at any scale. Though Grafana is arguably only a visualization tool since it doesn’t collect its data, its ability to integrate with other platforms for free makes it extremely useful.  Grafana’s main drawback is that comparing data from a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment can be difficult. Though you can combine multiple data sources, you must do so using custom queries, so if you’re working in a multi-cloud environment, interpreting data can become complicated very quickly.  #20 Open source monitoring tool: Elastic Stack Elastic (ELK) consists of three parts: Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash, with the recent addition of Beats. Each part serves a different function. Elasticsearch is a REST-ful, JSON-based search and analysis engine. Logstash provides data processing. Kibana functions as a search engine. With rapid, reliable data storage and integrations with a wide range of tools, this option is very flexible for cloud or on-premise stacks.  In other words, Elastic Stack pulls data from other sources and delivers it to a “stash” like Elasticsearch, and with Kibana, you can visualize that data. You can start with a free trial and then choose between their Standard ($95/month), Gold ($109/month), or Platinum ($125/month) tiers. Elastic Stack’s main cons is its limited storage capacity, and it also is known for having noisy logs and the occassional poor indexing.  #21 Open source monitoring tool: Zabbix Zabbix can help you with infrastructure, applications, and service monitoring. Though designed as an enterprise-class platform, it still works well for SMBs, both on-premise and in the cloud. It comes with free resources and subscriptions for more advanced training, and a community that can help your team learn and grow. Though Google Cloud and other real-time monitoring offerings aren’t available with this tool, you can integrate Zabbix with a third-party tool to fill in the gaps. Zabbix is known for its fierce learning curve and overwhelming interface, so new users beware!   Cloud monitoring FAQ How does cloud monitoring work? Typically your cloud vendor will offer their cloud monitoring services. GCP has Google Cloud Operations Suite, Amazon has CloudWatch and CloudWatch Log, and Azure has Azure Monitor. These tools start to hit limits when you are handling a multi-cloud environment.  Your typical cloud monitoring tool that your cloud vendor provides will only give you insight into that one platform, which means dashboards upon dashboards of data in different tools. Aggregating and analyzing those numbers to see where performance can be improved – and what tools and users might be sapping costs for low ROI – becomes a full-time job that no one has time for. Cloud monitoring tools are the solution that lets you gather all your data in one place, providing a snapshot of all your multi-cloud applications in one place.  If you’re working in a public cloud, cloud monitoring changes from a nice to have to a must. Public cloud tools are near impossible to monitor without a cloud monitoring solution because of their low visibility. Hybrid cloud environments are also harder to handle because you must navigate multiple architectures. All of which can be simplified with a cloud monitoring tool.  Why is cloud monitoring important? Cloud monitoring is critical for businesses that run some or all of their workloads in the cloud. Benefits you can expect from cloud monitoring include:  Visibility. Where your native cloud monitoring tools might only have some data and insights, cloud monitoring software lets you get a full view of how your platforms are operating.  Security. Tools can help you improve customer security and privacy to better protect user data.  Efficiency. Cloud monitoring solutions mean you can automate previously manual processes and analyze data from a multi-cloud environment in comprehensive dashboards.  Cost optimization. Cloud monitoring will show you the areas of your cloud structure that are bringing in the most and least profit so you can adjust your spending accordingly.  Reduce your cloud spend while increasing revenue with cost cloud monitoring tools Need a cloud monitoring tool for your FinOps organization that can determine how much ROI you’re getting from the cloud with an easy-to-use dashboard and data down to the hour and retention periods up to 18 to 24 months? You need Anodot’s cloud cost management tools. Get all your multicloud and K8 data in one place. Make cloud budget management easy.  Anodot works with your FinOps team to identify and optimize cloud irregularities. Our tools blend seamlessly with your current cloud or hybrid setup so you can cut up to 40% in cloud costs.  Need proof of concept? Talk to us so we can discover how you can save up to 40% with our cloud monitoring tools. For additional insights, you might find it helpful to check out our lists of the top MSPs in Israel and the top MSPs in the UK to see how different service providers approach cloud monitoring.

Our Cloud Cost platform just got some practical upgrades to help you manage cloud costs better and boost your operational efficiency. Curious about the new features? Let’s jump right in! Forecast in ChatGPT Interacting with cloud cost data just got easier and smarter. Ask any cost-related question using natural language, and let CostGPT do the rest. It instantly delivers insightful visualizations and forecasts of your cloud costs. Our AI-powered forecasting accurately predicts future spending based on your historical data, making cloud spending insights more accessible and actionable than ever.   IPv4 to IPv6 Transition Big changes are happening in AWS's IP management, with AWS's recommendation regarding the migration from IPv4 to IPv6. Since February 1, 2024,  IPv4 addresses incur hourly charges, making a switch to IPv6 more necessary than ever. his transition isn't just about cost savings; it also brings better performance, enhanced security, and improved scalability. Use AWS’s latest tools along with Anodot’s analytics to manage this shift smoothly and efficiently. AWS ECS Fargate Right-Sizing Efficiency is key in cloud management, and our latest recommendation for AWS ECS Fargate right-sizing is all about optimizing resource utilization. This update guarantees you're using the right resources in the right way, reinforcing operational efficiency and driving down costs. With Anodot’s tools, right-sizing your ECS tasks on Fargate can lead to potential cost reductions of 30-70%. For more details on how to cut costs, read our comprehensive AWS recommendations documentation. Explore the details in our comprehensive AWS recommendations documentation. And if you're keen for more info, why not book a demo tour today?

As of 2023, 89% of companies are using a multi-cloud approach.  The race to the cloud might feel truly like that – a race – but the finish line isn’t hybridization or even a full migration.  Even after you’ve made it to the cloud, there’s still more work. Namely, determining cloud costs. Microservices, containers, Kubernetes made resource costs, associated costs and more are near-impossible to sort though. Without a way to put a reason to a price tag and to break down where your money is going, justifying cloud costs is near impossible.  This is why 32% of cloud budget goes to waste.  That can be made 0% with cloud cost management tools.  What is cloud cost management? Spend for fully cloud and hybrid cloud environments is a stubborn mystery without the right cloud cost management solution.  Cloud cost management, also known as cloud cost optimization, is how you can finally put a number to your cloud spend. Cloud cost management gives you the tools to enable you to monitor, measure, and control spend for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud providers.  It should be noted that increased cloud costs isn’t always a bad thing. Adding more customers is going to increase your AWS bill. The real question is how much your margins are increasing the more you onboard.  As more companies migrate to the cloud, cloud cost management platforms continue to evolve. Traditional cloud cost management focuses on reducing idle resources and using discount program purchases.  Modern tools focus on architectural optimization. The goal of this shift is to ensure that you and your company are only paying for the infrastructure you and your customers need. Measuring unit cost, cost per customer, and COGs are vital. In particular, to help monitor margin increases, cloud cost management tools will track how your customers are using your product so you can optimize cost and performance without sacrificing customer satisfaction.  Think of it this way. Have you ever looked at a tool in your cloud platform and thought, do I really need this?  If you answered Yes, you need a cloud cost management solution.  Cloud clost management solutions benefits Cloud cost management comes with benefits both clear and hidden. Here are a few you can expect:  Improved forecasting visibility which enables you to grow faster but at lower costs.  Improved visibility into the impact of work for your whole team, making it easier to highlight achievements and assess failures. Ability to easily determine which services are best for each application in terms of cost-effectiveness.  Power to properly set your pricing structure as you have a complete understanding of operational costs. Bettered understanding of your most and least profitable customers, projects, and cloud technologies. Cloud predictability that means there is no question as to where your money goes when it enters the cloud. Cloud cost management solutions mean you have complete control over your cloud experience. You have clear visibility into current spend and future forecasting, and can adjust your prices and customer offerings to optimize spend while increasing profit. What types of cloud cost management softwares are there? Cloud cost management softwares depends on your need and your team size. If you have a small team, the cloud cost management service provider by your cloud vendor could suffice. Azure Cost Management, Google Cloud Cost Management, and AWS Cloud Financial Management tools all include improved accounting softwares and even alarms that you can customize as needed.  But you’ll likely chafe with these tools if you’re at a larger company or if you’re looking for data that populates without you having to lift a finger. That’s where cloud cost management tools come in.  These services are designed to pull data for multiple clouds and build reports that you can screenshot and spread if costs are getting too high, or if the tool has uncovered a way to improve your efficiency.  These tools can vary from those available for any organization, to those that are well-versed with your specific industry. It is hard to onboard new companies that aren’t familiar with your very sector-specific rules and regulations, which is why if you’re a FinOps or a healthcare organization, it would be to your benefit to select a tool that already has experience in your field.  How we picked the top tools of 2024 We reviewed these tools based on these five features:  Scalability & compatibility. The cloud is ever-changing. To get consistent data, you’ll want to partner with a cloud management software provider who can match changes in the cloud and changes in your business. Your ideal provider should be able to match your needs stride for stride, offering optimal compatibility no matter the ask.  Security & compliance. Data in the cloud is often sensitive, and you shouldn’t have to worry about cybersecurity or compliance issues.  Reporting & monitoring. Top cloud management platforms should have easy to read, understandable, and customized reports to fit your company’s needs.  Pricing. Quality often comes with a hefty price tag. Cloud management softwares that rank well with price are those that offer a competitive price without sacrificing excellence.  Customer support. You should get help when you need it, and quickly. Accessible phone support, live chat, and rapid responses is a must.  Work in Government? Learn all you need to know from our cloud experts about which government cloud offering will work best for you: GovCloud and Azure Government.  Best cloud cost management tools Before we jump into why we ranked these tools as we did, here's a quick overview of our top cloud cost management softwares of 2024. Each category is rated on a scale of 1-5. Company Scalability Security & Compliance Reporting & Monitoring Price Customer support Overall Rating Anodot 5 5 5 4.5 5 4.9 Zesty 4 5 3 5 5 4.4 Densify 4 3.5 5 4 5 4.3 Cloudability 4.5 4 5 4 4 4.3 VMware Aria CloudHealth 4 4 5 4 4 4.2 Datadog 4.5 4 4.5 4 4 4.2 Kubecost 3.5 4 4 4 5 4.1 Harness 4 4 4 4 4.5 4.1 Turbonomic 4.5 3.5 4 4 4 4 Azure Cost Management + Billing 3.5 4 4 5 3.5 4 CAST AI 5 4.5 3.5 3.5 3 3.9 Amazon CloudWatch 3.5 4 3.5 4 4 3.8 ServiceNow 3.5 4 4 4 3.5 3.8 Anodot Anodot's tech has helped clients save up to 40% on annual cloud spend using proactive analytics powered by AI and ML. International fortune 500 companies use Anodot for cloud management to reduce cloud waste and increase revenue.  With Anodot, you can count on:  Integration with a vast monitoring system means excellent customer experience at a budget-friendly price.  Personalized dashboards to track unit economics and spend. Autonomous anomaly detection, recommendations, and forecasts mean for easy user experience and a cost efficiency boost. Granular attention to detail so you can save costs at every opportunity. Complete management and control of your multicloud with one tool. Easy to use and understand dashboards means action items that get things done, making for seamless cross-team collaboration. Identify and resolve problems before customers even know they exist. FinOps expertise which eliminates lengthy on-boarding time and means Anodot can start helping you save ASAP.  Anodot provides next-gen level intelligence to identify anything from revenue-critical business incidents to budget optimization opportunities in real time. Its alert system means you can safeguard your revenue without having to constantly monitor your cloud usage. Overall, we rate Anodot a 4.9. Anodot’s ability to help FinOps companies save up to 50% on yearly cloud spend put it far ahead of the pack. Schedule a demo today to see how you can catch up on saving.  Zesty Zesty's main draw is its automation abilities. Though its reports are not as sophisticated as other cloud management softwares on this list, it is easy to adjust spend as needed with this tool. For example, Zesty can be automated to monitor the market for discounted instances with excess capacity on the cloud. It also has a tool enabled by AI algorithms that work with AWS's API to run only the machines needed for a specific user to improve budget.  Zesty has also expanded to offer commitment discount options (Zesty Commitment Manager). Currently, this option is only available for AWS users. It also has Zesty Disk, an optimizer that dynamically shrinks or expands your disk capacity to meet your usage requirements on an as-needed basis.  Overall, Zesty is a great choice for automation, but not the best in terms of monitoring. For this reason, we rate it a 4.4. Densify Densify's cloud resource optimization tool excels at providing cost-saving opportunities. This cloud management solution recommends running clusters by keeping precise and meticulous data loads that you can quickly scale up or down.  Densify believes that by having optimizers focused on cloud resources like Kubernetes clusters and VMware, you can improve scaling by 30%. Expect alerts for over-allocated resources or instances of poorly used family instances. Overall, we rate Densify a 4.3 because of its ability to create extensive and detailed reports that appease stakeholders of any standing.  Cloudability Apptio's Cloudability will make your accounting team happy by breaking down in-use cloud instances to easily allocated costs. Cloudability's True Cost Explorer has pivot table charts that lets you switch between aggregated variables to predict future costs, taking the mystery out of cloud prices. Cloudability integrates with a wide variety of tools as well, blending with ticketing tools like Jira or tracking tools like Datadog. With its budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing offerings, Cloudability is a flexible tool that is sure to help you reduce your cloud costs while maintaining efficiency. Our overall rating for this cloud management software is a 4.3. VMWare Aria CloudHealth VMWare nests Aria Cost and Aria Automation under the CloudHealth software banner. Both these tools manage hybrid and full cloud deployment. Aria Cost specializes in spend optimization. It tracks spending and optimizes deployments to improve cost effectiveness.  Its dashboards are perfect for financial managers and deployment teams, the former with a full view of forecasts and cost metrics, and the latter with security enforcement and automated deployment.  Overall, we rate VMWare’s Aria Cloudheath a 4.2. Its showback and chargeback features mean cloud cost accountability is easy to measure and empowers you to optimize spend, and its appealability across teams is hard to beat.   Datadog Datadog expands beyond cloud costs. It focuses on application cost and performance with its dashboards, with an eye for cost savings tools. It integrates with almost any popular tool or service and offers real-time monitoring dashboards of your servers, databases, and other tools.  Datadog is known for its ease of use and rapid deployment. Allocating your cloud spend by AWS or Azure, product, service, or team, or by cluster, node, or pod for Kubernetes' K8s.  Overall, we rate Datadog a 4.2. Datadog makes it easy to monitor across multiple clouds, which is a good tool to grow with, and with its custom metrics and application-level cost data, it’s a solid cloud cost management solution.  Kubecost Kubecost is a great cloud cost tracking tool if you need to monitor your Kubernetes spend. Able to work across all major cloud and on-prem hosted pods, Kubecost tracks costs as Kubernetes adjusts loads. Reports are customizable and provide dynamic recommendations to adjust for cost savings. Any unexpected deployments or large jumps are flagged.  Similar to CastAI, Kubecost provides real-time visibility into your K8 cluster cost data. As your bill can be broken down by namespace, service, deployment, and costs across multiple clusters, custom optimizations are easy to apply.  For this reason, we rate this cloud cost management tool a 4.1, with our main con being that though this tool still works with AWS and Azure, it was designed to best help Kubernetes performance.  Harness Cost Management An ideal choice for DevOps teams to get cloud budgets in order, Harness Cost Management lets you track cloud usage data by the hour. It makes it easy for you to determine which features are in high use, which are underallocated, and which are completely idle. Completely unused instances can be automatically stopped, which is a great hands-off feature for cost savings.  While Harness doesn’t map cost to specific projects or features, it provides the context necessary for reporting. Cost anomaly detection and alerting tools are also included in their standard cloud cost management package.  Overall, we rate Harness Cloud Cost Management a 4.1. It offers well-rounded cost management services, with excellent customer service, but it doesn’t delve as deeply into reporting or other cloud management aspects.  Turbonomic IBM's Turbonomic delivers AI-powered solutions that match application demand stride for stride. Expect for Turbonomic's tools to start, stop, and move applications, all in response to demand. Since the data that the AI runs on is constantly learning, it will continue to grow and evolve to personally fit your business model. Engineering teams don't have to worry about resource allocation because Turbonomic's AI will do that for them.  Cost management for on-prem, cloud-native, and hybrid cloud applications is done by scaling resources to optimal performance and costs. As with other tools on this list, Turbonomic also includes idle resources and discount coverage identification and other cost-saving recommendations. Because of this, we rate Turbonomic a 4. Azure Management Tools Azure Cost Management + Billing is Microsoft Azure’s native cloud management tool. As such monitoring of Azure cloud costs, cost analysis, cost optimization, budgeting, and cost management data exports are all top notch.  You can also manage billing data from Azure and AWS if you use both tools.  With that said, this isn’t the best tool if you’re looking for cloud management software that specializes in improving efficiencies and cutting costs. It’s also not the best tool if you’re managing a multi-cloud platform across AWS, Azure, and GCP.  Overall, we rate Azure Management Tools a 4. It has free tools to get started with improving cost efficiency for Azure cloud, but it’s not top of the line in terms of scalability or customer service.  CAST AI CAST AI is known for being one of the best Kubernetes autoscalers, helping you better use resources while cutting costs. Advanced K8s cost management capabilities and AI inspections mean for real-time optimization recommendations. These automations can be applied to cluster hibernation, rightsizing, and instant rebalancing.  CAST AI integrates well with OpenShift for AWS, EKS, GKE, AKS, and KoPs.  A downside of CAST AI is that its platform has a steeper learning curve.  Overall, we rate CAST AI a 3.9, with its main drawbacks being it is harder to learn without customer support.  Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch is AWS’ native cloud cost management tool. Expect in-depth AWS cost reporting on over 70 AWS applications, resources, and services on a single, easy to use dashboard. It can be used in tandem with AWS Cloud Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, and AWS Budgets. It’s also easy enough to customize things to set anomaly alarms, pull custom metrics, or automate actions on Kubernetes, ECS, and EKS clusters.  With that said, this tool can only go so far. It’s perfect for basic monitoring, but its user interface can get clunky when you want to use multiple tools. The data retention is also not the best, and it’s impossible to collaborate with your team.  Overall, we rate CloudWatch a 3.8. It’s a great tool if you’re looking to get started on cloud cost management for AWS, but if you want to really see cost savings and efficiency increases, you’re best off looking elsewhere.  ServiceNow If you have multiple teams running multiple microservices, ServiceNow is a good cloud management tool.  It has customer-facing solutions that make this a great tool to easily translate data to third parties and backend tools that optimize output. Depending on your service selection, you can also pick an AIOps to provide automated AI solutions.  Overall, we rate ServiceNow a 3.8. If you’re looking for help with microservices and want a tool that provides reports for third-parties and your internal team, it’s a good choice, but its specializations don’t lie with cloud cost optimization.  Cloud cost management FAQ Is cloud cost management really that important? Cloud costs grow with the cloud landscape. In larger organizations, where decision making is decentralized, expense visibility is low. As companies continue to race against the clock to migrate to a hybrid, fully cloud, or multi-cloud environment, it’s easy to pick up high-cost services with questionable returns.  This is why if you want to enable fast growth and maintain profitable margins, cloud cost management is incredibly important.  This is especially the case if you are using a multi-cloud combination. Cloud cost management provides visibility into the cost of different public cloud providers, making it easy to uphold accountability while improving efficiency and performance.  Without cloud cost management, it is common for businesses to overpay for underused cloud services or inadequate performance. Looking for an MSP in your region? Discover our top Israel and UK MSPs!  What are common cloud cost management strategies? Cloud cost management strategies vary depending on your goal and company. Common strategies include:  Power scheduling. Some companies don’t need their services 24/7. Overnight or over-weekend shutdowns can save a lot of excessively used budgets while maintaining customer satisfaction and efficiency.  Automatic scaling. Right-size your cloud usage to your company needs, and have your cloud scale up (or down) with you as that usage changes. This means you’re only paying for the cloud services you need at that current time.  Discount instances. Discount instances often don’t guarantee availability, so they're not the best choice for heavy workloads, but when used sparingly at the right time, they can save you a lot of money.  Remove unused instances. If you’re not using it, get rid of it. Save budget.  Get help from a third party tool. You don’t have to juggle a cloud cost management strategy on top of everything else. As you’ve seen above, there are tools that can pull all of this data – and more – in a helpful 24/7 dashboard to answer any and all the questions you need.  Anodot’s cloud cost management solution Cloud cost visualization services give you peace of mind so you don’t have to worry about how much you’re spending in the cloud, but instead you can brag about how much you’re saving with tools like Anodot’s cloud cost management tools. These cloud management solutions mean you can get data down to the hour with retention periods up to 18 to 24 months. With all of your multicloud and K8 data in one place, you can easily review and adjust cloud budgets accordingly.  Anodot demystifies cloud costs for FinOps organizations. We do this by working with your team, spotting irregular cloud spend to make your systems more efficient and cost-effective. You can up to 40% on annual cloud spend with Anodot's Cloud Cost Management solution.  Need proof of concept? Talk to us for more insight into cloud usage, costs, and how much you can save with Anodot’s tools. 

The world of tech in Israel is constantly evolving. As of 2023, the tech industry accounted for 18% of Israel’s gross domestic profit – and about half of its exports. If you can’t keep pace with that growth, you’ll fall behind. That becomes a problem when you need to focus on driving profit and don’t have time to juggle the limitations of your tech stack.  That’s where MSPs come in.  MSPs will help train your IT team or act as your IT team, building apps, optimizing your backend or frontend, and cloud management. It does the work so you can focus on your business, and, most importantly, your profits.  But MSPs are keeping pace with the evolution of tech, which means finding the best provider for your company is difficult.  Don’t worry. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you.  Discover which MSP is the best fit for your company from our list of 2024’s top 10 MSPs in Israel below.    What Features Should You Look For In Managed Service Providers in 2024? Before we dive into our top 10 MSPs in Israel for 2024, let’s talk about why we added these managed service providers to our list.  When considering what MSP is the best choice for your company, we considered five factors:  Monitoring and support. The MSP you pick should turn fire drills into FYI emails. It does this by vigilant monitoring and 24/7 helpdesks.  Security. This is our top consideration because, ultimately, growth doesn’t matter if your data isn’t safe. All of our MSPs are known for their quality cybersecurity, but providers that rank highly are known for their threat detection and data protection services, as well as HIPAA, GDPR, and other industry-specific compliances and certifications.  Scalability. Depending on your project, you may want your MSP to grow with your company.  Transparency and cost. Transparency and cost are placed together because some MSPs might include hidden fees. Reputation and reviews. You need to be able to trust your MSP. Feel free to request references, and make sure to review case studies.  Keeping this list in mind, here are our top 10 Israeli MSPs for 2024. Top 10 MSPs in Israel Here are what our top 10 MSPs are at a glance:  MSP Monitoring Security Scalability Cost Reviews Rating TLVTech 5 5 4 5 4.5 4.7 Automat-IT 5 4 5 4 5 4.6 Dofinity 5 4.5 5 4 4.5 4.6 TeraSky 5 5 4 4 4.5 4.5 CloudZone 4.5 4.5 5 4.5 4 4.5 Taldor 4.5 5 5 3 5 4.5 Unilink 5 4 5 3 5 4.4 Adaptiq 4 4 5 4 5 4.4 Komodo Consulting 5 5 4 3 5 4.4 Best MSP for Development: TLVTech Good dev work is hard to find. You can stop looking with TLVTech.  Partnered with AWS, Azure, and GCP, TLVTech is a small but mighty MSP. Services provided include mobile app, web, custom software, AI development, and cloud consulting. Expect all your tech needs to be covered – from frontend to backend, to DevOps, and data engineering, and QA automation.  This is a go-to MSP if you need software consulting. TLVTech is well-versed with niche compliance and regulation requirements, so you don't need to worry about it struggling with your business' learning curve.  Price Prices range from $100 to $149 per hour, with project sizes usually between $10,000 to $49,000.  Pros Reviews speak highly of this MSPs cloud and architecture consultancy, cybersecurity and app development, interactive, real-time dashboards, and extensive QA processes. If you’re looking for an MSP that can develop its way out of a paper bag, TLVTech is your best pick.  Cons The most obvious con is that TLVTech not the best pick if you need cloud support or to augment your IT team. If you need full-stack support, this is the provider for you – but if you want a company that lives and breathes cloud consulting, keep looking.  Overall Rating Our overall rating for TLVTech is 4.7. This MSP is great for development; it has experience with various industries and company sizes. Its only downside is that it’s not also an expert in all things cloud.  Best MSP for Startups: Automat-IT Automat-IT is the ideal MSP for startups. It typically works with customers in DevOps, FinTech, health, gaming, and tech, specializing in automation, self-service, and implementing and managing Kubernetes.  Its goal is to help customers overcome IT complexity while delivering services in a timely manner that saves budget. A constantly growing MSP, Automat-IT is always developing new solutions that enable startups to launch cloud AI capabilities.  Price Automat-IT’s pricing varies depending on the size of your project and company.  Pros Though Automat-IT typically focuses on AWS cloud, it is also an expert in helping companies develop and execute effective and efficient DevOps and FinOps strategies, advising on management of Kubernetes clusters, cost savings, and even improving visibility into environmental costs.  If your smaller organization needs help with migrating to the cloud while improving efficiencies and cutting costs, this is the MSP for you. Automat-IT has experience helping over 300 startups boost cloud efficiency and cut operational costs. Its 24/7 customer operations support means you can rest easy.  Cons Automat-IT is an excellent option for smaller companies seeking IT or cloud support. It brings years of expertise in DevOps and FinTech. Though it has more limited experience with enterprise-sized companies, which could be a drawback, its commitment to pricing transparency is notable.  Overall Rating Automat-IT is an ideal choice if you’re a startup looking for guidance in the cloud. Its 24/7 helpdesk means you can get the answers you need anytime. Its continued growth in AI cloud support means you can count on them to help scale with your company. With that said, it’s more limited in the offers it can provide for larger companies. For that reason, we rate Automat-IT a 4.6.  Best MSP for Enterprises: Dofinity Need comprehensive IT support for an enterprise company? Dofinity’s specialization is providing large-scale organizations with optimized and innovative state-of-the-art mobile and web solutions. It splits its focus between web development, cloud and DevOps consulting, application management support, and more, having partnered with AWS, Azure, GCP, and SAP. Dofinity has experience working in gaming, marketing, education, medical, energy and natural resources, and nonprofit industries. Its main focus is enterprise-sized customers, but it does work with some mid-market organizations and select small businesses.  Price Price ranges from $100 to $149 per hour. This varies depending on company size, industry, and project needs. Project sizes are typically $200,000 to $999,999.  Pros Dofinity’s reviews speak highly of this MSP. From end-to-end monitoring to consulting, training internal IT teams, platform development, and more, Dofinity acts as an extension of the enterprises it works with. If you’re a large company that needs support with anything from AI to web development to staffing, Dofinity can assist with rapid expertise.  Cons The obvious con is that this is not the MSP for you if you're a small company, as the services come with a higher price tag.  Overall Rating Overall, we give Dofinity a 4.6 rating. The biggest downside for this MSP is its higher prices, and that it’s not the ideal fit for a smaller organization. Beyond that, Dofinity offers stellar services, so there’s little in this MSP not to like! Best MSP for DevOps: TeraSky The challenges of DevOps can be seemingly endless; overcoming platform engineering, infrastructure, and nonstop change is a daily struggle, made all the more difficult when trying to turn a profit. We recommend Anodot’s partner, TeraSky for DevOps support.  TeraSky works as an advisor to SMBs and enterprise-sized companies. Its experts create multi-cloud and next-gen data centers and enterprise-grade cloud-native infrastructures, all with optimal developer experience on a time-to-market scale. TeraSky helps you make applications better and faster. No matter the software foundation – Kubernetes, Severless, etc. – TeraSky can help you rule the cloud.  Pricing TeraSky’s pricing ranges depending on your company size and project request.  Pros TeraSky is built to help your DevOps setup evolve. Expect uninterrupted, secure platform engineering, innovative applications, and next-gen multi-cloud set ups designed for the private, public, or hybrid cloud. It has experience working with organizations ranging from enterprises to SMBs. You’re working with an award-winning business if you pick TeraSky, and you’ll be able to see the expertise.  Cons So, what’s not to like? There aren’t as many reviews and testimonials for TeraSky as other MSPs on this list as it hasn’t worked with as many customers.  Overall Rating TeraSky’s overall rating is 4.5. It’s brought down only by its lack of reviews and lack of transparency. If you’re a DevOps company, this is a great MSP to pick! Best MSP for the Cloud: CloudZone Company in the clouds? CloudZone can help!  If you need cloud consulting for public, hybrid, or private solutions, Anodot’s partner, CloudZone, should be your top choice. Each of its packages includes consulting, managed, and professional services, as well as 24/7 NOC services. This MSP is an expert in sectors ranging from DevOps to FinOps. It can help with big data, security, Kubernetes, and, of course, managing a hybrid environment or migrating to the cloud.  Many reviews speak of how quick and communicative this MSP was in helping solve IT or cloud environment issues. It works with clients of any size, from minor to enterprise-sized businesses. Since it's partnered with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, it can easily provide support.  Pricing CloudZone provides custom pricing models once you speak with its customer service. It bases its prices on company size, project ask, and your industry.  Pros This MSP is the ideal choice if you need anything from managing a hybrid environment, migrating to the cloud, or training your team in the new environment. It provides everything from cybersecurity to machine learning and AI support. With over ten years of experience, you're in good hands with CloudZone if you need IT or cloud support.  Cons CloudZone can cover all your MSP needs – help with the cloud, monitoring, cybersecurity – but it doesn't have as many reviews as the other MSPs on this list.  Overall Rating Overall, we give CloudZone a 4.5. It can deliver on your MSP needs by providing cybersecurity and 24/7 monitoring support, and you can expect expert guidance in the cloud, but its reviews and pricing transparency are lacking in comparison to other MSPs on our list.  Best for Years of Experience: Taldor Need an MSP whose experience you can trust, no questions asked? Taldor is the pick for you. With almost 40 years of experience, this Israel-based MSP is known for its custom software development, cloud consulting, cybersecurity, IT managed services, and more. Having worked with Cisco, HP, VMWare, Oracle, and other international leading suppliers, you’ll be in the hands of true experts no matter your ask if you work with Taldor.  Having worked with over 1000 companies in IT, government and security, health, the public sector, and FinTech, Taldor is well-versed in industry-specific compliance and regulation rules.  Price Taldor provides a custom pricing model that varies depending on company size, industry, and project ask.  Pros Expect expert solutions for anything from infrastructure optimization, cybersecurity, navigating the cloud, and outsourcing. Taldor has excellent reviews, and over 90% of its clients are repeat customers, speaking to not only its expertise, but its stellar customer experience.  Cons Taldor is an unquestionable expert in its field. Its team of over 2,000 employees can assist with almost any tech question you could pose. The only drawback is a lack of pricing transparency.  Overall Rating Overall, we rate Taldor a 4.5. Its biggest con is its lack of pricing transparency. This MSP is an unquestionable expert in its field with almost half a century of expertise, so it would be hard to go wrong if you have the budget for its services.  Best for Managed Services: Unilink Ltd. Unilink Ltd. is our go-to recommendation for IT-managed services. As experts with almost 30 years of experience in the field of custom software development and IT-managed services, Unilink Ltd.’s team can help you reduce system costs while improving output.  Its tailored services are rapid and cost-effective, assisting with anything from outsourcing of infrastructure to software development and QA. You’ll be in good hands with Unilink’s 24/7 consultants.  Price Minimum project size is $10,000+. Pricing models are personalized based on your company size, project ask, and industry.  Pros If you need outsourced staffing resources for anything from full stack development to DevOps to cloud solutions to hardware testing and more, you’re in good hands with Unilink. Its managed services are top of the line and quick. Its cloud support and disaster recovery are also top notch.  Cons With high quality services covering the entire IT managed services spectrum and experience supporting clients in FinTech, telecom, energy, and even start-ups, there is really only one con for Unilink: the price. The minimum project size is larger than the other MSPs we’ve listed, and there’s also less visibility into what informs Unilink’s prices. Overall Rating Overall, we rate Unilink a 4.4. Its main con is a lack of visibility into pricing, but if you have the budget to afford it, you’ll be in good hands no matter your industry or project ask.  Best for IT Staff Augmentation: Adaptiq You don't need to sweat the IT problems when you work with this MSP. Adaptiq specializes in IT staff augmentation and DevOps as a service, working as an extension of your team so you can focus on the things that matter. As experts with more than 10 years of hands-on experience, expect Adaptiq to handle all things IT.   Adaptiq works primarily with other IT industries but has experience with business services, eCommerce, automotive, and FinTech industries. Though Adaptiq has worked with small to enterprise-sized businesses, client sizes are predominantly in the midmarket range.  Price Price varies from $50 to $99 per hour. This changes depending on the project and company size. To get a personal estimate, speak to Adaptiq’s customer service.  Pros Adaptiq has great reviews. Its customers speak highly of its IT staff augmentation, cybersecurity, development, QA, and DevOps services. Having worked with projects from $200,000 to $999,999 and with customers from various industries, this MSP will be able to hit the ground running no matter your industry or company size.  Cons Although Adaptiq has good reviews and offers a wide variety of services, it isn’t the most transparent on its prices.  Overall Rating Overall, we rate Adaptiq a 4.4. It’s a great choice if you’re looking for help augmenting your IT staff.  Keeping your data secure in this day and age is no joke.  Best for Cybersecurity: Komodo Consulting Komodo Consulting's goal is to make cybersecurity simple. It has thousands of successful penetration tests and red-team projects, so if you're looking to keep your data safe, this is the MSP for you.  Specializing in penetration testing, application security, third-party risk management, and incident response, Komodo has been serving Fortune 500 companies across the US, Europe, and Israel. It typically works with FinTech, insurance, automotive, energy, healthcare, and international businesses of any size.  Price Komodo Consulting has a custom pricing model that varies from customer to customer. Contact their customer service to get your personal quote.  Pros You won’t have to sweat cybersecurity again after Komodo Consulting reviews your tech stack. It will tighten up cloud security and improve your FinTech crypto platform with ease.  Cons If you need cybersecurity, Komodo Consulting is your MSP. Be it black box testing, cloud security assessments, or even SOC 2 penetration testing, you’re covered. But if you want help with IT team augmentation, keep looking. Komodo Consulting is also not as upfront about their costs.  Overall Rating Overall, we rate Komodo Consulting a 4.4. This MSP is an expert in cybersecurity and cloud security, which means your data will be safe… but you’ll also want to keep looking if you need IT staff augmentation.  Best MSP for FinTech: Scalo Finding good partners for your FinTech company is hard. On-boarding partners who are ignorant to a minefield of regulations is even harder. Why not start with an MSP with experience so it can hit the ground running? Over 25% of Scalo’s clients are in the financial industry. If you’re looking for custom software development, IT staff augmentation and/or managed services, big data consulting, or FinOps guidance in the cloud, you’ve found the right MSP.  This MSP has 15 years of experience in the global software development market, almost 800 successful projects, and industry experience beyond FinTech, including media and entertainment, eCommerce, healthcare, banking, and more. Its 600 developers specialize in custom software development, quality assurance, machine learning and security, and cloud expertise.  Price Prices vary from $50 to $99 per hour with typical project sizes between $50,000 to $199,999.  Pros Scalo is an international MSP, with branches in Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Kraków, Wrocław and more, so if you need worldwide support in additional time zones, this is the MSP for you. Its prices are reasonable for its level of expertise, and its reviews are great, speaking to Scalo’s rapid, quality work and reliability. Scalo also has a range of midmarket to enterprise to small business clients, so it's experienced with companies of all sizes.  Cons Scalo will have almost all of your bases covered for FinTech. We say almost all, because there is one (small) downside to this MSP: its expertise does not lie with cybersecurity. If you’re looking for cybersecurity experts, you’ll be better off searching elsewhere.  Overall Rating Overall, we rate Scalo a 4.4. If you need all things developer support, IT team augmentation, and FinOps cloud consulting, you can stop here. If you’re a FinTech company who needs top-of-the-line cybersecurity services, keep looking! MSP FAQ What Exactly Is an MSP? An MSP is a managed service provider. These providers are an easy way to outsource your IT woes. A common choice for SMBs, standard MSP services include network, application, security, infrastructure management, and, of course, help navigating to either a cloud or hybrid environment, and cloud environment optimization. Managed service providers can also help with development and cloud support. It’s common for MSPs to offer monitoring, 24/7 help desks, and training for your IT team.  How Do MSPs Work? MSPs work by providing outsourced IT support for companies of varying sizes and industries. If you are facing cybersecurity risks, need a complete revamp of your IT stack, or need help in your efforts to migrate to the cloud, MSPs can make things easy.  Why Do I Need an MSP? If you need to pick between having an optimized OS and profit, you need an MSP. If you’re struggling with gathering the manpower and expertise to migrate to the cloud, you need an MSP. Managed service providers are an easy answer for optimizing revenue while reducing tech stack costs and improving efficiency.  What Kind of MSP Do I Need? The type of MSP you need depends on your company size, industry, project ask, and your budget. If you’re looking for help updating your IT stack, you’ll likely want to work with a very technical MSP.  If you’re a FinTech company, you’ll want to work with a managed service provider that has experience with the compliance and regulations common to your industry. The same applies if you’re trying to migrate to the cloud or establish a hybrid set-up. Doing so can be tricky, especially when you need to account for price tags you may not fully understand. MSPs are best used in tandem with tools that let you measure cloud usage and optimize costs properly.  That’s where Anodot comes in.  Why You Should Prioritize MSPs that Work With Anodot Juggling profit with migrating to the cloud with IT management – even with the lift of an MSP – is difficult, especially when you have to justify the cost of working in the cloud. Get peace of mind with cloud cost visualization services with Anodot’s cloud cost management tools. You’ll be able to get data down to the hour with retention periods up to 18 to 24 months. With all of your multicloud and K8 data in one place, you can easily review and adjust cloud budgets accordingly.  Made for FinOps, Anodot demystifies cloud costs. We do this by working with your team, helping spot irregular cloud spend and making your systems more efficient and cost-effective. Reduce your cloud waste and cut costs while perfecting your IT with an MSP. Save up to 40% on annual cloud spend with Anodot's Cloud Cost Management solution.  Need proof of concept? Talk to us for more insight into cloud usage, costs, and how much you can save with Anodot’s tools. 

Navigating the complexities of cloud financial management requires more than just tracking costs – it demands a strategic approach to measure and optimize cloud spend. We have put together our top 7 KPIs, ranging from allocatable cloud spend and average hourly costs to sophisticated forecasting, to effectively gauge your FinOps solution success.  Each KPI offers unique insights, helping businesses manage and maximize their cloud investments. Allocatable Cloud Spend Allocating cloud costs is critical for understanding actual service usage and establishing accurate budgets and forecasts. To optimize your FinOps practice, aim for at least 80% of cloud spend allocation. This KPI is crucial for detailed visibility into cloud services usage at different organizational levels.   Average Hourly Cost Normalizing cloud service costs across various projects and billing methods is key. Average hourly cost provides a standardized metric to assess financial planning and resource allocation effectively, thereby enhancing decision-making. [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Cloud Unit Costs Grasping unit economics related to cloud spending is vital for assessing cost-effectiveness concerning business growth. This KPI helps in correlating cloud spending growth with business objectives, providing critical insights for strategic planning. Percentage of Wasteful Spend Reducing waste in cloud spending is essential. This KPI identifies areas of overspending and underutilization, highlighting potential savings and optimizations, thus improving financial efficiency. Blend of Purchasing Strategies Diversifying purchasing strategies can significantly impact cloud efficiency. This KPI assists in achieving a balance between various purchasing options, such as on-demand, reserved instances, or spot instances, maximizing cost savings and operational effectiveness. Time to Address Cost Anomalies Rapid response to cost anomalies is vital. This KPI evaluates the effectiveness of your response strategies to unexpected cost variations, minimizing financial risks and ensuring cost-efficiency. Forecasting Accuracy Accurate forecasting is essential for budgeting and strategic planning. Evaluating the variance between forecasted and actual cloud spend is key to making informed financial decisions, allowing businesses to adapt and optimize their cloud strategies. Conclusion These seven KPIs form the backbone of an effective FinOps strategy, guiding organizations toward optimized cloud financial management. As cloud infrastructure continues to be a major budget component, understanding and applying these metrics is crucial for financial success. If you are looking for more in-depth metrics and their role in driving effective cloud financial management, download the full whitepaper.