Most businesses looking for a cloud platform to store and move their data tend to go with Amazon Web Services (AWS) owing to its straightforward configuration.
This assists in better managing increased customer expectations and enhanced performance. However, the increased complexity of AWS has made it challenging to manage costs effectively.
Despite being completely aware, businesses need to pay more attention to cloud storage usage and its associated costs in their attempt to manage cloud costs.
Organizations should not limit their focus to just one aspect, such as compute resources; instead, they should explore methods to optimize cloud storage costs within AWS.
By effectively aligning AWS compute resources and storage usage, businesses can regulate expenses and make the most of their investments.
This blog aims to cover various AWS cost optimization tools and software, addressing essential aspects like compute resources and storage usage.
Maintaining control over cloud spending and ensuring optimal utilization of investments demands efficient AWS cost management.
While compute resources are undeniably crucial in cost optimization, it is equally vital not to disregard other key elements like storage.
Amazon Web Services offers different types of storage that cater to different use cases and requirements.
Listed below are some of the storage provided by AWS:
Wondering why, despite the categorization, our focus is on AWS EBS?
This is because EBS features like those mentioned below account for a substantial portion of the Amazon Web Services bill.
Neglecting cost optimization of EBS can result in inefficient resource allocation, budget overruns, and increased operational expenses, all of which have the potential to shake the very foundation of your organization's financial well-being.
To help our customers further understand the reason for focusing on EBS usage for optimum AWS cost optimization, we conducted research and found out in our study that:
Moreover, did you know a report by Virtana suggests that while 94% said their cloud cost is increasing, 54% said their storage spend is growing faster than the overall cloud cost.
Organizations can reduce costs, prevent overprovisioning, and ensure resource efficiency by adopting effective EBS usage management tools and software.
The granular control over storage resources will align storage capacity with the needs, thus leading to better cost management in AWS.
This is why when looking for AWS cost optimization tools, you should not just settle for compute resources but simultaneously invest in storage cost optimization tools, each focusing on different aspects like compute resources and storage such as EBS.
Different providers offer different AWS cost optimization tools that help organizations efficiently manage their cloud costs by optimizing compute resources or storage.
You must invest in the following tools to ensure comprehensive cloud cost optimization.
AWS cloud infrastructure provides a wide array of tools and resources designed to streamline expenditures across various aspects.
Using these AWS cost optimization tools, businesses can tailor their cost-saving strategies to specific aspects of their cloud operations, from resource optimization to Elastic Block Store (EBS) usage fine-tuning.
Tools That Focus On AWS Cloud Storage Optimization
Lucidity, with its industry’s first EBS Auto-Scaler, helps enterprises manage their block storage efficiently without any downtime or DevOps time requirements.
The tool is used by multiple Decacorns and Fortune 500 companies to optimize their cloud storage.
Understanding the impact of challenges associated with ignoring EBS, such as inefficient resource allocation and budget overruns, we at Lucidity help tackle the issue with our EBS Auto-Scaler.
Unlike other cloud cost optimization tools focused on the effective optimization of compute resources, we at Lucidity have built an autonomous storage orchestration solution.
Lucidity is designed to help businesses relying on the AWS cloud to save money by eliminating the possibility of overprovisioning through effective EBS usage optimization.
Sitting as an intelligence layer over your AWS and block storage, our Auto-Scaler automates capacity management, leading to automatic expansion and shrinkage of the disk when needed, without any buffer time, downtime, or performance gap.
We help businesses eliminate the constant worry of EBS usage management and reduce storage costs by a staggering 70% without any downtime or performance issues.
How do we work?
We at Lucidity understand that many organizations use the lift and shift strategy to move from on-premise infrastructure to cloud infrastructure. This results in many unused, overused, or underused storage.
Going the traditional route for AWS cost optimization will result in wasting valuable resources, or they might remain unused. Organizations may end up overprovisioning or underprovisioning.
Furthermore, it is a constant struggle to strike a perfect balance between under-provisioning and over-provisioning, which can lead to performance issues.
This is where Lucidity’s Block Storage Auto-Scaler comes to your rescue.
Lucidity’s Auto-Scaler is quick and easy to implement with just 3 clicks, and it automatically adjusts the live block storage depending on the workload.
This means that with Lucidity, shrinkage and expansion (within 1 minute) of disk storage are done automatically.
No matter how quickly your requirements change for storage, our Block Storage Auto-Scaler intelligently adjusts the storage capacity while maintaining performance and ensuring cost efficiency.
The moment it becomes onboarded, it starts scaling its storage to increase disk utilization to 70-80%, bringing the cost down.
It provides the space necessary to deal with unexpected/heavy traffic/workload surges in one minute.
Moreover, from onboarding, the entire responsibility of EBS management falls on us as we automate the entire process.
Lucidity can be deployed in one of the following ways:
We start by conducting a comprehensive storage audit that assesses your present storage arrangement. This audit aims to develop it into a full report revealing potential savings areas.
Through our one-click comprehensive audit, you will discover the following:
Unlike going through manual discovery or utilizing monitoring tools, which lead to performance lags or downtime, Lucidity Storage Audit is a simple-to-use executable tool that automates the entire process.
Our Lucidity Storage Audit is a free-to-use, comprehensive analysis tool that helps you understand your cloud cost in-depth, allowing you to determine areas requiring specific optimization improvements.
We give you a holistic view of storage within 1 week with little to no effort and help you understand the disk health, how cloud resources are used effectively, and prevent the possibility of any downtime.
With us, you can rest assured that there will be no impact on the cloud environment and the resources.
Immediately following the audit, we integrate the Lucidity system into your infrastructure within 15 minutes, so there is no operational hiccup or changes to your established architecture.
By working with us efficiently, you would be well-supported toward positive ROI in as little as 1 hour after our implementation starts.
Based on the audit report, we implement an agent-based architecture on every EC2 instance, where this agent serves a dual role of utmost importance:
Benefits of Lucidity Auto-Scaler
Deploying Lucidity’s Managed Disk Auto-Scaler will help optimize AWS costs by offering the following benefits:
For example, to improve a 65% buffer, the manual method would require 4 hours of downtime to shrink 1TB storage.
Furthermore, any disk upgrade to enhance the buffer by 65% might increase latency by 30%, which means the time to read and write data to an EBS volume will be longer.
But with Lucididty’s NoOps Disk Auto-Scaler, there will be zero downtime, and you will never run out of space during the surge.
Conversely, in situations of small volume demand, Lucidity enables seamless shrinkage, thereby minimizing latency. This is possible because Lucudity begins the expansion of disk storage within 1 minute of the request being raised, and shrinkage occurs seamlessly without any performance degradation.
Moreover, through our tailored policy feature, you can decide the desired utilization and the buffer size, which means you can create a policy according to your specific usage.
To develop a policy, go to the “Manage Policy,” put in the necessary information, and press “Create Policy.” Doing so will optimize all your instances according to the policy's parameters you establish.
You can generate “n” number of policies where each one is dedicated to various cases, along with specific usage and buffering requirements. The instances will be automatically managed as per the policies.
Lucidity offers dynamic resource allocation wherein the NoOps Auto-Scaler monitors the storage usage of EBS volume, automatically expands in 1 minute, and shrinks seamlessly, ensuring there is no downtime and no latency increase, respectively.
We will ensure that you will always have enough space for effective resource allocation management, and you will be able to scale with an increase/decrease in demand.
Furthermore, you can check via our ROI calculator how much you will save once you start using Lucidity for storage optimization.
All you have to do is set the service provider to AWS, add to your disk spend either by year or month, your disk utilization and annual disk growth rate, and voila!
You will have the amount you will save if you have Lucidity’s EBS Auto-Scaler in your system
ProsperOps is an AWS cost optimization software that can optimize your AWS environment without disruptions.
It utilizes Amazon’s most advanced algorithms and AWS best practices to detect inefficiencies in businesses’ IT infrastructure, underutilized resources, and cost savings opportunities without compromising data privacy and security.
One of its notable features is its automatic management of Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) prepayment limits.
Moreover, ProsperOps optimizes compute costs by intelligently combining convertible and standard instances, ensuring businesses get the most out of their investments without disruptions.
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It is a cloud management solution and an advanced AWS cost optimization tool. With Zesty’s sophisticated automation features, an organization can quickly minimize cost-saving efforts, leaving room for putting resources into other equally important initiatives.
Zesty makes processes such as allocating resources and monitoring their usage more efficient with automation, which saves a considerable amount of time that the DevOps team can be dedicated to innovation and other strategic activities.
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Tools That Provide Profound Visibility And Reporting Features
Cloudability by Apptio is one of the AWS cost optimization tools that helps business in mapping engine, ensuring accurate allocation of all costs, including IT costs. It is a valuable tool in instances such as show-back or charge-back scenarios in an organization.
In addition to cost allocation, Cloudability employs advanced right-sizing solutions that span multiple public clouds–helping organizations cut unnecessary costs and strategically channel budgets into promising initiatives.
Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudability enables companies with cost transparency capabilities that make it easier for the firms to spend wisely, allocate each penny, and provide easy ways to achieve sustainability and increase revenues.
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CloudZero offers an innovative solution to optimize costs on the cloud of Amazon Web Service through being proactive about cloud cost management.
The tool pushes the boundaries of automation by employing an innovative cloud intelligence analyst who carefully scrutinizes the organization’s cloud spending and produces a detailed monthly assessment report with suggestions for optimal utilization of resources.
As such, this distinct approach helps managers put the cost of the cloud into perspective, leading to a clear understanding of the money they spend on clouds.
In addition, Cloudzero’s dedication to eradicating cloud overspending cannot be overlooked since it instantly takes action concerning suggestions for the efficiency of resources compliance with budgets.
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FinOut offers a robust solution for effective cost management by providing comprehensive AWS cost optimization tools to track expenses at a granular level, including per cost center, namespace, and more.
With FinOut, you can gain detailed insights into your costs, enabling precise allocation and tracking.
The platform offers customizable dashboards and reports, allowing you to measure usage-based expenses accurately.
This flexibility empowers you to tailor your cost optimization strategies according to your needs and preferences, enhancing overall financial management efficiency.
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Through insight into your resource use and cost assignment of AWS spend, nOps can assist you in reducing it to even 50 percent while still assuring your business’s performance and availability needs are satisfied.
Utilizing nOps allows you to save costs significantly with minimal manual intervention, thereby saving valuable resources that could be used for strategic development and growth.
nOps even lets you save on your cloud bill by automatically turning off the resources you haven't used for the longest time.
The software automatically adjusts to any changes in the configuration of your compute resources by buying or selling reserved compute time.
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Harness is an all-in-one hybrid cloud management and cost optimization tool for simplified AWS service management. This gives solid footing for gathering and analyzing cloud spending data and reporting, giving organizations deep insights into their cost structure.
Using Harness, companies can adapt cost management solutions for their need with customized dashboards, selected cost categories, and Kubernetes cost analysis functions.
It also provides a proactive capability of cost anomaly detection and resolution; it identifies expensive problems and takes correct action immediately.
As a result, there is no need for any custom scripts or manual engineering on cloud cost optimization thanks to Harness, which actively uses idle cloud resources.
Harness even lets you analyze current spending habits and compare them with budgetary targets with machine learning-based forecasting. Based on this, you can see what resources are being used, idled, and unallocated by the hour.
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Yotascale offers invaluable real-time cost anomaly reports, enabling companies to promptly identify and address potential cost issues.
Its capabilities extend to sophisticated workload right-sizing and efficient management of AWS Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans (SP).
Additionally, Yotascale provides actionable recommendations tailored to generate savings for businesses while reducing overall production costs.
This multifaceted approach makes Yotascale an essential tool for companies seeking to optimize their cloud spending and enhance cost efficiency.
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Opsani can self-manage runtime environments and optimize applications at large. With the help of AI-driven optimization, Opsani dynamically adjusts to changes in workloads and resource needs, thereby keeping apps running efficiently at minimum cloud cost.
Opsani simplifies the monitoring process through a user-friendly, comprehensive report. This report covers crucial aspects such as traffic analysis, service level objectives, and costs.
Opsani automates the scaling process by intelligently selecting when to scale up or down based on your specific requirements, including duplicate needs and cost constraints.
This intelligent approach ensures that Opsani optimally aligns your resources, meeting service-level objectives while keeping costs in check.
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Economize is one of the versatile AWS cost optimization tools designed to assist enterprises in analyzing, managing, and optimizing their AWS costs.
With a comprehensive set of features, Economize enables organizations to monitor their cost spending, identify areas for optimization, and simplify the forecasting process.
Its adaptive approach empowers businesses to make informed decisions, maximize cost-efficiency, and achieve optimal utilization of cloud resources.
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AWS Native Tools
AWS Cost Explorer is an advanced cost optimization solution that helps enterprises thoroughly analyze and optimize their AWS spending.
It uses powerful data analytics, which helps organizations understand their cost trends by revealing spending patterns on AWS at different times.
Also, AWS Cost Explorer predicts future costs, facilitating planning and budgeting. It provides insights about data for the current month and the last 12 months and offers forecasts for the coming 12 months.
Moreover, it enables companies to zero in on areas requiring more attention or where it is possible to save costs or find irregularities.
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AWS Trusted Advisor is an optimization tool that helps you save costs by finding underutilized or inefficient elements of your AWS infrastructure.
Through AWS Trusted Advisor, enterprises may save inappropriate costs for unnecessary items by receiving suggestions based on best practices and AWS guidelines.
It analyzes usage, configurations, and spending and offers actionable recommendations to maximize cost savings.
AWS Management Console provides an interactive dashboard with various views on different aspects of your AWS environment, like cost management, security, and performance.
It suggests foundational security measures to improve the security of the AWS environment.
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AWS Budgets is a cost optimization tool that empowers organizations to manage their AWS expenses by setting personalized budgets and getting notified whenever a cost or usage exceeds or exceeds the forecasted or expected budgeted limit.
Using AWS Budgets, companies can define their budgetary limitations by different parameters, such as tagging, accounts, or kinds of resources.
Such granularity allows for accurate cost tracking and management, keeping expenses within financial objectives and limits.
You can create your budget by using the AWS Budgets. With AWS, you can allocate budgets for various factors associated with your resources, including the cost, and utilization of particular services/accounts.
With AWS Budgets, users can organize their budget according to a monthly, quarterly, or annual periodical cycle.
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AWS CloudWatch is a full-fledged monitoring and cost management tool that helps users measure resources like logs and metrics, set off alarms, or even auto-react to any changes.
Your applications and infrastructure real-time performance will be insightful so you can easily detect and solve issues arising.
This enables efficient resource optimization by enabling automatic reactions based on specified thresholds and regularities, thus making sure that your AWS resources work correctly and at an affordable cost.
With CloudWatch, you can create dashboards showing real-time metrics and logs. It also allows you to easily manage and analyze log data from different sources with log streams.
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With CloudTrail being very affordable, it has proven to be instrumental to audit and security because it allows the capture of real-time user activities in the entire AWS infrastructure space.
The recording of API calls and user actions helps to capture a history of AWS usage for various entities for legal purposes.
With this, auditing becomes accessible for compliance, troubleshooting, and security analysis since an audit trail allows you to identify who did what in your AWS environment clearly.
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Amazon S3 Analytics is an automated analysis and visualization tool of Amazon S3 Storage that helps customers with decision-making concerning moving data to various storage classes.
The solution looks deeper into access patterns, data life cycles, and cost optimization opportunities for firms to cut storage costs while guaranteeing data availability and durability.
It also provides deep data insights using ML, AI, and data analytics and helps eliminate operational challenges by allowing data archival to S3.
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Using the CUR report, you can analyze your expenditure on various services and AWS resources to determine what drives cost and allocations per department or project. It even lets you automatically send the CUR in CSV format if required.
With this information, a company using AWS can make data-driven decisions at any point to optimize its deployment onto the cloud.
These active columns conform to particular services at your perusal, allowing maximum flexibility and analysis. You can publish the entire billing report into the S3 bucket.
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Tools That Focus On Optimizing Compute Resources
CloudCheckr is a robust optimization engine designed to ensure customers achieve significant cost savings on cloud expenditures without compromising application flexibility or performance.
By analyzing intricate details of customer cloud usage patterns, providing insightful analytics, offering remediation advice, and employing automatic resource tracking, CloudCheckr delivers comprehensive solutions.
This empowers users with profound insights and actionable recommendations, enabling them to make informed decisions that prevent unnecessary expenses while maintaining optimal application performance.
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Densify is a company that provides optimization services for Kubernetes and containerized workloads, thus ensuring their operation does not entail extra costs.
Machine learning analysis helps identify workload patterns to determine the optimal size for computing and instances.
Moreover, it does well in managing cloud instances that enable firms to make decisions concerning allocations of resources, resizing, and cost-saving strategies, among others.
Using Densify provides companies with a simple and effective means of implementing cloud and container management to achieve high performance at reduced costs, thereby promoting cost efficiency.
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Spot is the AWS cost management platform that changes cloud infrastructure for enterprises.
The main reason why Spot stands is that it has unbeatable automation capabilities, which allow you to always use suitable, efficient, as well as affordable infrastructures for the workload.
Spot eliminates these risks through automated cloud infrastructure provisioning, thus ensuring that your application remains supported constantly.
It even helps reduce data requirements and cuts cloud storage costs. This helps ensure business continuity with minimal disruption.
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Granulate employs AI-based real-time operating system (OS) adjustments to optimize computing resources effectively.
This innovative technology enables Granulate to handle diverse workloads by dynamically adjusting its deployment in response to specific tasks and their impacts.
By tailoring its resource allocation, Granulate ensures optimal performance and responsiveness making it a valuable solution for businesses with varying computing demands.
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CloudBolt is an advanced hybrid and multi-cloud cost management platform that empowers organizations with comprehensive control over their cloud resources and expenditures.
Its features include identifying idle resources, automating policy-driven resource orchestration based on custom policies, seamlessly switching between multi-cloud costs without constraints, and providing consolidated analysis on a unified platform.
Moreover, CloudBolt facilitates real-time assessments, enabling organizations to make informed decisions and effectively minimize unnecessary spending, making it an invaluable tool for optimizing cloud expenses and enhancing overall operational efficiency.
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Balancing high-quality performance, security, and cost control is crucial when leveraging AWS.
AWS cost optimization tools mentioned above will transform cost management from a tedious task to a strategic move, improving efficiency and return on investment.
Among the myriad tools and software options in the market, Lucidity stands out by specifically targeting and effectively addressing key challenges in AWS EBS management.
It tackles issues such as cost wastage, downtime, and inefficient utilization of DevOps teams with a unique approach that guarantees peace of mind.
Lucidity achieves this by optimizing EBS resources, ensuring that organizations only pay for what they need.
This streamlined resource allocation leads to significant cost savings and minimizes wastage. Additionally, by reducing downtime and preventing unnecessary expenses, Lucidity allows businesses to focus their DevOps teams on innovation and strategic initiatives rather than juggling resources.
Don’t let EBS challenges hold you back.
Reach out to Lucidity experts today.