AWS offers over 300 services, making it one of the most versatile cloud platforms. But as your organization scales, keeping track of every service, optimizing usage, and holding teams accountable for cloud costs becomes a challenge. In fact, managing costs manually often proves impossible.
That’s where cost management tools come in. AWS provides native tools to help organizations monitor and optimize their cloud spend. Additionally, third-party tools offer advanced features and tailored solutions for more specific needs. This blog explores best AWS cost management tools – both native and third-party tools that can help you take control of your AWS costs efficiently. Read on!
The Benefits and Features of AWS Cost Management Tools
Businesses can easily lose track of where and how resources are used as they expand their cloud infrastructures. Gaining more transparency in this area is critical to avoid overspending and minimize cloud waste. The right cost management tools take the guesswork out of this process and help you optimize your cloud costs without impacting performance.
Below, we’ll explore the improved visibility, automation, and efficiency that these solutions bring.
Comprehensive cost visibility
Before you can make decisions on your cloud spending, you first need to have the visibility. But gaining this perspective means more than reviewing your monthly cloud billing reports. You need to understand the what, why, where, and by whom of your cloud costs to accurately understand the usage patterns. AWS cost management tools deliver granular insights into each of your cloud expenditures in near real time.
This level of detail allows businesses to:
- Analyze cloud resource usage across different services, regions, applications, and instance types.
- Create custom spending reports to track spending patterns across various services and internal departments.
- Design more accurate forecasting models for balanced budget allocations.
Cloud cost optimization and efficiency
AWS cost management tools play a critical role in minimizing your total cost of ownership (TCO) in the cloud. For example, it’s common for EC2 instances to experience lower activity periods from time to time. But if idle resources continue to go unnoticed, they strain your budgeting while providing little value.
Cost management tools help you identify these situations as they happen, allowing you to rightsize your resource allocations before they lead to more cloud waste.
Many AWS cost optimization solutions also offer customized recommendations based on historical usage data to help you identify the waste and take action accordingly. By reviewing and acting on these suggestions, you can improve your resource management efficiency while increasing your cost savings.
Proactive monitoring and alerts
Many businesses have multiple departments managing different cloud projects. While this helps to streamline operations, it also leads to a lack of transparency and accountability between teams. Cloud spending can quickly scale out of control without proactive monitoring of how resource costs impact departmental budgets.
AWS cost management tools apply real-time monitoring of your cloud activity to help you avoid unexpected billing surprises.
Tools like AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection allow businesses to create custom alerts built around their governance policies. If spending goes past a certain budget threshold, teams get automatic alerts so they can take immediate action to fix the issue.
Improved resource optimization
The AWS resources you use, such as EC2 instances and EBS volumes, and how you use them (i.e., storage, computing power, data transfer), will significantly impact your total cloud spend. So, it’s important to continually review your cloud environment to understand what resources you need compared to what you have in place.
AWS cost management tools help companies identify idle and underutilized resources that can be optimized to reduce cloud costs and improve efficiency.
Easier management of Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
We encourage you to get familiar with AWS’ pricing models, so you understand how your cloud costs are calculated. You should also familiarize yourself with the discounts offered by your public cloud provider.
Two powerful discount vehicles offered by AWS, Savings Plans (SPs) and Reserved Instances (RIs), can be leveraged to reduce your cloud costs. The discounts you receive are provided in exchange for committing to use AWS compute resources for a one- or three-year term.
Some AWS cost management tools offer basic visibility into Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, tracking metrics like utilization and coverage. Others like ProsperOps, are fully automated FinOps automation platforms that help you manage your rate optimization efforts without consuming your engineering time.
Automation
Cloud deployments are highly dynamic and require careful monitoring as business needs change. But optimizing all the elements associated with cloud costs takes a lot of time and team co-ordination.
The great thing about many popular AWS cost optimization solutions is the automation that comes with them. Rather than needing to manually analyze hundreds or thousands of billing entries, automated tools handle this in real time.
In addition to regular cloud monitoring, many AWS tools come with autoscaling features that rightsize over- or under-provisioned resources as they occur. By combining this capability with pre-assigned optimization policies, businesses can design a hands-off approach to cost-saving initiatives.
5 AWS Cost Management Tools You Must Know
Depending on your priorities (cost visibility, monitoring and alerts, resource optimization, reporting) there are quite a few different SaaS solutions that can support your AWS cost optimization efforts.
Here are five tools you can use to reduce the cost of your AWS services, along with their key features and primary use cases:
1. ProsperOps
ProsperOps is an automated FinOps platform that automatically blends AWS discount instruments to maximize your cloud cost savings. With over $2.4 billion in cloud spend under management, we help you take control of your AWS cloud costs and leverage discount plans like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. By analyzing your real-time cloud usage and converging your commitment portfolio to the most optimal coverage available, ProsperOps helps you achieve an Effective Savings Rate of 40% or more.
As your business grows, ProsperOps dynamically adapts to your new usage changes without any technical trade-offs or operational friction.
Key features
- Automatically blends and optimizes your portfolio of discount instruments to maximize savings
- Easy setup and frictionless operation that requires zero infrastructure changes or manual intervention
- Provides more transparent cost visualization for better understanding of the financial impact of AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
- Zero risk pricing model where you only pay a percentage of savings generated
2. CloudZero
CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform designed to give engineers and finance teams more visibility and control in the cloud. It combines highly granular consumption details with powerful data visualization to provide a fully transparent cost management tool.
CloudZero uses real-time cloud monitoring and custom alerts to keep teams on top of their spending habits, even in multi-cloud environments. To maximize cloud savings, you can integrate the granular visibility of CloudZero with automated rate optimization of ProsperOps.
Key features
- Proactive cost anomaly detection and customizable usage alerts with real-time notifications
- Powerful cost allocation tools for tracking AWS usage and identifying new areas for optimization
- Discount management dashboard centralizes AWS discounts to help you maximize the value of your portfolio
3. Xosphere
Xosphere is a cost management tool that uses instance orchestration to help businesses better leverage available Spot Instances in Amazon EC2. The tool integrates easily into existing Amazon Auto Scaling Groups and automatically assigns Spot Instances when they’re available.
Xosphere installs in just 10 minutes when using AWS CloudFormation and doesn’t require third-party access to manage. By leveraging available Spot Instances as they appear, businesses can save up to 90% on EC2 costs compared to On-Demand rates.
Key features
- Minimizes downtime by spreading Spot Instances across instance types and availability zones
- Works natively with existing Auto Scaling Groups and lifecycles without changes to current infrastructure
- Flexible instance orchestrator settings when using AWS tagging
4. Densify
Densify helps businesses optimize their AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes deployments, making it easier to manage resources across platforms like Red Hat OpenShift, AKS, and GKE.
The tool works by analyzing ongoing workloads and automatically adjusting container configurations, instance types, and other parameters needed to run applications efficiently. By providing deep visibility into AWS environments, Densify helps businesses make sure they have the right resources in place at the right time.
Key features
- Rightsizes EC2 instances, containers, and clusters automatically to reduce cloud waste
- Recommends the most ideal configurations for optimizing Kubernetes performance and cost efficiency
- Provides detailed analyses of resource utilization to help identify costly bottlenecks
5. CAST AI
CAST AI delivers intelligent Kubernetes automation that claims to reduce your costs by over 50%. The platform continuously monitors your clusters in real time and applies changes as needed to optimize your configuration for maximum cost efficiency and performance.
It’s an all-in-one solution that combines cost monitoring, autoscaling, and rightsizing, along with automated security, to enhance your DevOps efforts and help you run your containers confidently.
Key features
- Reduces Kubernetes costs through automated scaling, provisioning, and bin packing.
- Provides real-time visibility into expenses, allowing users to monitor costs across clusters, workloads, and labels.
- Helps you balance performance and cost-effectiveness when deploying large language models (LLMs) for generative AI.
- Adjusts resources dynamically based on workload demands, ensuring efficient resource utilization and performance.
- Offers seamless integration and management across multiple cloud providers for more flexibility and no vendor lock-in.
6 Native AWS Cost Optimization Tools To Consider
Even though the third-party AWS cost optimization tools might provide deeper granularity, better automation and advanced features, cost can be a factor for many organizations. Thus, here are six AWS native cost management tools that you should be aware of:
1. Billing and Cost Management Console
The Billing and Cost Management console is a centralized platform where businesses can manage all elements of their AWS accounts. Using its easy-to-navigate interface, organizations can easily locate their monthly AWS billing reports, payment profiles, credits, and billing preferences — all in one place.
AWS Billing also provides quick access to various cost analysis and optimization tools to help you maximize cloud savings. Businesses can use cost categories and allocation tags to organize their spending across different teams and create custom reports for their partners and end-users.
2. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a comprehensive native tool that leverages cloud usage data to provide businesses with relevant insights about their spending habits. Using Cost Explorer, businesses can create preconfigured views of all billing data, making it easier to filter and analyze their resource allocations for improved cost optimization.
Cost Explorer provides the increased visibility needed to make more informed decisions when configuring cloud deployments. You can identify key cost drivers in alignment with historical usage trends to better predict budget needs and identify optimal savings opportunities when using Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
3. AWS Budgets
Image Source: Amazon
AWS Budgets is another native cloud optimization tool that helps you set custom budgets and forecasts for cloud spending. Rather than having to monitor and control cloud costs manually, AWS Budgets tracks your spending in real time and can alert you when you come close to or exceed established thresholds.
Using AWS Budgets, businesses can create custom actions associated with their accounts to avoid under- or over-provisioning EC2 instances. You can also receive updates on forecasted spend based on usage trends and create scheduled reports to streamline accounting processes.
4. AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor is like a personal assistant that helps you increase performance and optimize your costs across the AWS platform. Trusted Advisor actively monitors your cloud usage and provides recommendations across six categories:
- Cloud cost optimization
- Performance
- Resilience
- Security
- Operational excellence
- Service limits
By following each of the recommendations provided, businesses can reduce their overall spending and maximize their cloud ROIs. Choose between different Trusted Advisor support tiers, each of which offers additional features and deeper insights.
5. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a free tool provided by Amazon that uses machine learning models to monitor and analyze patterns in your company’s historical AWS spending and resource usage. With this real-time oversight, the tool can detect cases of anomalous spending and provide root cause analysis.
Businesses can then define anomaly thresholds and receive notifications if unanticipated spikes in usage occur. With Cost Anomaly Detection, businesses don’t need to wait for their monthly cloud bill before addressing resource inefficiencies. Anomaly Detection is easy to set up and operates in real time, ensuring businesses consistently have a clear picture of what is driving their cloud spend.
For a more detailed overview of the tool, read our blog: AWS Cost Anomaly Detection Guide.
6. AWS Pricing Calculator
Free with all cloud deployments, AWS Pricing Calculator allows businesses to create custom cost estimates when subscribing to different AWS services. Designed to be user-friendly and highly customizable, Pricing Calculator helps businesses model their cloud solutions before building them to ensure they’re financially feasible.
AWS Pricing Calculator is directly connected to the AWS ecosystem and allows businesses to save estimated pricing for all their service configurations. You can sort estimates by certain groups and export them in CSV or PDF format as needed.
Best AWS Cost Management and Optimization Tool: ProsperOps
With so many options to scale your cloud architectures in AWS, you need the right tools in place to maintain visibility and control over your resource allocations. But while custom reports and intelligent recommendations are important, acting on them quickly is what makes all the difference when it comes to maximizing your savings.
ProsperOps is a leading FinOps automation platform that enables businesses to automatically take advantage of all discount instruments available to them.
Rather than relying on manual intervention, ProsperOps dynamically adapts your commitments in near real time, providing a hands-free cloud cost optimization solution that fits seamlessly into your current cloud workloads.
We remove the effort, latency, and lock-in risk associated with manually managing rigid, long-term commitments and fully automate cloud rate optimization for you.
With ProsperOps automation, there is no impact on engineering. Our platform setup is quick, and our systems work behind the scenes to optimize your cloud costs. This allows your teams to concentrate on innovation and growth while we automate cloud cost optimization for you.
To see ProsperOps in action, book a demo today.
