Best Tools For AWS Cost Optimization In 2024 | Complete Details

In the vast field of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is a dominant force.  Although it offers more than 200 different services, using them simultaneously is expensive. Its significant components include cost control, robust security, and excellent performance. They turn cost management from a difficult task into a calculated choice. With the right tools, you can focus on enhancing productivity and return on investment rather than worrying about costs.

What Is AWS Cost Optimization?

You should apply best practices that reduce costs to maximize your investment in AWS cloud computing. This process is known as AWS cost optimization.  Cost optimization is traditionally seen by legacy cost tools as a straightforward process of minimizing cloud costs, usually by using some optimization strategies:

• Recognizing improperly used resources
• Getting rid of waste
• Putting money aside for higher savings
• Additionally, right-sizing computing services for scale

Efficiently managing AWS expenses is an ongoing task. It reduces costs and also aligns spending with your business objectives.

AWS framework:

The well-structured AWS framework outlines five principles for effective cost management. Let's explore these guidelines:

1. Evaluate and Assign Costs:

Use cloud tools to identify system costs precisely. It facilitates the transparent allocation of IT costs to specific tasks, enabling better resource optimization and cost reduction.

2. Evaluate Overall Efficiency:

Measure the business output of a workload and its associated costs. This information can help you assess the benefits of enhancing output while minimizing expenses.

3. Embrace Cloud Financial Management:

Achieve business value swiftly with cloud financial management. However, this requires investing time and resources in developing capabilities, including processes, programs, and knowledge.

4. Avoid Unnecessary Heavy Lifting:

Let Amazon handle data center operations. AWS cost management tools offer managed services, reducing the effort required for maintaining operating systems and applications.

5. Execute a Consumption Model:

Optimize AWS costs by paying only for necessary resources. Adjust usage based on fluctuating business needs for efficient cloud cost management.

Best Tools for AWS Cost Optimization:

Tools for Amazon cost optimization can be divided into multiple categories. Depending on your needs and situation, we've categorized them below and provided arguments for using or not using these products. Let's go over these best tools in more detail:

1. Cloud Cost Intelligence Tools
2. AWS Native Cost Optimization Tools
3. Tools for Amazon Continuous Cloud Optimization
4. Traditional Tools for Cloud Cost Management
5. AWS Kubernetes Cost Tools
6. Point Solutions For AWS RI Management

1. Cloud Cost Intelligence Tools

These tools allow engineering teams to view the cost of the features they are working on, together with appropriate information, rather than just displaying total cloud prices, such as monthly EC2 spend. They may use this cost data to consider cost like any other performance parameter and use it to inform choices on everything from development to finding and fixing problems in production.

CloudZero:

One great illustration of a cloud cost intelligence solution is CloudZero. Without requiring a lot of human labeling, it provides dev teams with specialized views, readily explorable context, and automated cost anomaly notifications. Through cost-per-feature, cost-per-customer, Snowflake cost intelligence, Kubernetes cost monitoring, unit cost analysis, and other methods, businesses may use CloudZero to manage their costs.

Using cloud cost intelligence, finance may make business decisions like raising prices for various target segments, and engineers can make well-informed judgments about architecture and development that enhance profitability.

2. AWS Native Cost Optimization Tools

For small businesses with a relatively simple cloud bill, free native AWS solutions might be an insightful place to start. These are a few instances:

AWS Trusted Advisor:

Among the many features offered by AWS Trusted Advisor are improvements in security and speed, cost savings over time, and infrastructure optimization for your AWS account. It looks at your Amazon configuration and provides the best guidance on fault tolerance, performance, cost-cutting, security, and service limitations.

AWS Budgets:

Using AWS Budgets, you may set the budget for certain Amazon services. Additionally, the resources can be linked to specific data that increases output. Finally, the Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows you to receive emails or messages informing you of events related to the AWS Budget. For example, if you use many Amazon EC2 instances or the Amazon CloudFront CDN, you can set up an overall budget for the complete account or a single resource.

AWS Cost Explorer:

It is a fully managed service. It provides you with a thorough perspective of your AWS consumption and expenses. The application facilitates educated decision-making regarding resource allocation, improving cost optimization, and employing specialized reporting, data analysis, and cost forecasts.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection:

Using cutting-edge machine learning technology, Amazon Cost Anomaly Detection can swiftly pinpoint the reasons behind irregular spending trends and help you take appropriate action.

AWS Cost and Usage Report:

On an hourly, daily, or monthly basis, the AWS Cost Usage and Report tool offers a comprehensive report on your AWS cloud cost optimization, consumption, service price, and other details. To keep an eye out for instances in the public cloud that can increase or decrease your expenses, you can also use AWS Cloudtrail, CloudWatch, and S3 Analytics.

3. Tools for Amazon Continuous Cloud Optimization

These tools employ artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning to automatically and continually modify applications and infrastructure to lower overall costs and increase efficiency. A few instances include:

Opsani:

Opsani improves cloud workloads regularly using AI and Machine Learning. Each time there's a new code release, a load profile change, or an infrastructure upgrade, Opsani adjusts for better optimization. Opsani can manage runtime environments individually, tune programs at scale, and optimize applications across an entire service delivery platform or within a single application.

Granulate:

Granulate uses AI to generate ongoing OS-level modifications that optimize infrastructure performance and costs. These systems demand a more intricate distribution of computational resources and have intricate use procedures. However, they offer a more controlled and configurable method for maximizing the kind of computing.

Spot.io

By automating cloud infrastructure, Spot.io offers always-on, always-scalable, always-affordable cloud infrastructure for your workloads. You can also use the most affordable computer resources, improve your infrastructure continuously, and maximize utilization using Spot.io.

Cloudbolt:

One powerful tool for managing costs in multiple and hybrid clouds is called Cloudbolt. This tool is more appropriate for enterprise cloud cost management on AWS, much like CloudHealth or Cloudability. With the help of this platform, you can integrate multi-cloud cost data into a single platform for unified examination, discover idle resources, and perform self-governing resource orchestration using custom policies.

Harness:

Originally intended for DevOps teams rather than finance and FinOps specialists, Harness began as a cloud management platform. However, you can gather, examine, and report your hybrid cloud expenses. These include those spanning AWS services by using Harness Cloud Cost Management.

4. Traditional Tools For Cloud Cost Management

About ten years ago, when AWS didn't provide much to aid engineering and finance teams in understanding AWS billing, several of these tools were developed. These tools are popular and helpful for cost reporting, assisting with purchasing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, and cutting down on waste. FinOps is a centralized team or user, serving as an interface between engineering and finance, and is the target market for these tools.

Densify:

Densify provides cost control and optimization for enterprise cloud and container systems. Traditional tools are hard to maintain and must be reviewed to ensure precision because they rely heavily on tags.

VMware CloudHealth:

This tool offers cloud computing services for performance, security, automation, governance, and cost control. Following the acquisition of CloudHealth, VMware has moved its focus to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing.

CloudCheckr:

CloudCheckr offers insight and visibility to minimize expenses, uphold security and compliance, and maximize resources.

Apptio Cloudability:

This tool offers real-time transparency and accountability for consumption by optimizing cloud resources and converting invoices and tags into insights.

5. AWS Kubernetes Cost Optimization Tools

One of these tools might be useful if you spend most of your time working with Kubernetes. This category's tools are limited to cluster activities. Some of these tools offer recommendations, while others are reporting tools. The detail about them is given below;

Amazon ECS:

It is a fully managed service for organizing containers.

Kubecost:

Kubecost provides insights into your Kubernetes resources, helping reduce AWS expenses and prevent resource-related issues.

Replex.io:

This tool specializes in Kubernetes governance and cost management for cloud-native enterprises.

Amazon EKS:

This service allows flexible management, running, and scaling of Kubernetes apps in the AWS cloud or on-premises.

GitLab:

This tool offers organizations source code management, security, CI/CD, and more to accelerate software delivery.

Spot Ocean:

Spot Ocean serves as a serverless infrastructure engine for containers. While these tools aid software development teams in using managed databases and various services, it's essential to note they may not cover all cloud costs. For a more comprehensive solution, considering additional tools is recommended.

6. Point Solutions For AWS RI Management

If you're searching for a completely automated way to manage savings and retirement plans, these DevOps tools can be helpful.

ProsperOps:

ProsperOps achieves impressive financial outcomes by smoothly combining Reserved Instances and Savings Plans with advanced strategies, perceptive algorithms, and ongoing execution. These methods help ProsperOps consistently deliver powerful financial performance. The scope of these tools is restricted to this particular area of cost optimization. Therefore, you may need to utilize them in conjunction with additional tools.

NOps

Your AWS budget can be automatically reduced by up to 50% with the nOps cloud management software. It accomplishes this by identifying your consumption habits and related expenses through machine learning. Then, nOps takes care of your reservations, finds and terminates unused resources, and executes workloads on the most economical spot instances.

Also, NOps improves container clusters and can assist in aligning your configuration with the well-structured framework. It is available through the AWS Marketplace or can be used independently as a SaaS platform.

Zesty:

Zesty adjusts the size of your cloud resources to match your current business needs. Storage, AWS Reserved Instances, and Savings Plan administration are all automated to do this. Through constant purchases and sales of AWS Reserved Instances, Zesty dynamically adjusts these discount commitments to your actual consumption requirements. Zesty Disk lets you reduce and increase block storage capacities dynamically based on usage in real-time, which can result in up to 70% savings on cloud storage fees.

FinOut:

FinOut offers more detailed insights into your cloud spend than native cost tools do. Your costs are visible by namespace, cost center, and other factors. Additionally, you can use configurable reports and dashboards to analyze usage-based charges. Additionally, you may configure personalized notifications to notify your team when specific expense or usage benchmarks are reached. In the end, FinOut lets you monitor expenses on all the major cloud computing platforms, such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, GCP,  and Kubernetes.

FAQs:

Q1: What is AWS Cost Optimization?

AWS Cost Optimization is the strategic practice of minimizing cloud costs while maximizing investment for efficient cloud management.

Q2: How often should I assess my AWS costs?

You should regularly assess AWS costs to align with changing business needs.

Q3: Are AWS native tools sufficient for small businesses?

For relatively simple bills, AWS native tools like Trusted Advisor and Budgets can be effective.

Q4: How do continuous cloud optimization tools differ from traditional tools?

Continuous optimization tools use AI or machine learning to automatically adjust applications for ongoing efficiency and cost reduction.

Conclusion:

Choosing the best option to increase AWS cost optimization can be challenging because of the abundance of options. While strategies like reducing waste and smart purchasing, such as using reserved instances, have been the usual ways to save costs, forward-thinking businesses now put a spotlight on enabling their engineering teams and optimizing their architecture.