What is Cloud Spend Management?

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a day that celebrates the love and affection in your life. And what better relationship in your life to highlight than your relationship with your cloud computing provider! Working with a designated cloud provider provides tons of benefits and foundations for companies of all sizes, however, many companies find themselves getting carried away with resource provisioning and end up overspending. Although your work within a provider is super impactful, it’s important to maintain competent cloud spend management- but what does that mean? 

Cloud spend management refers to the practice of actively monitoring your cloud spend and resources, analyzing and optimizing your cloud approach to deploy resources efficiently. While the term might seem straightforward, actually achieving efficient cloud spend is something that many companies struggle with. 

From a variety of cloud spend tools existing to dedicated cloud consultants ready to tackle your budget, fine-tuning cloud spend has become a top priority. And rightfully so, Techmonitor revealed that on average, companies waste about 21–50% of their annual cloud spend, with AI and SaaS fueling that statistic.

Why is Cloud Spend Optimization a Big Deal?

Outside of just saving your wallet at the end of the day, optimizing the way you spend on cloud resources creates a ton of benefits that affect all facets of your businesses. The benefits of cloud cost management include:

Enhanced Resource Utilization Visibility

Monitoring plays a key role in monitoring your cloud spend. From understanding where your budget is going to, to receiving alerts in any unexpected spending hikes/drops, monitoring is your first line of defense when it comes to overspending. And when it comes to cloud resources, overspending is not uncommon.

This enhanced resource utilization visibility comes in different shapes and sizes, too. From setting up detection alerts that notify users on massive spending surges, to a single-pane-of-glass that compiles spending across ALL cloud platforms being used, monitoring is an essential for any cloud environment. No longer do teams have to scramble when finding an unexpected charge on their cloud bill, but rather, can prepare so something like that never happens again. 

Outside of protecting your budget, there are many positive implications of strong monitoring. Enhanced cost predictions and budgeting capabilities come as a result of monitoring and analytics typically offered by cost management tools. Teams are now able to set budgets intuitively and allocate resources more responsibly with a better understanding of their current total spend. In addition, individuals no longer have to keep track of expenses from across dozens of platforms, cost management tools offering monitoring compile visibility into a single interface.

Increased Performance and Scale through Right Sizing

Right sizing refers to the practice of reducing or increasing the amount of resources allocated to a service in order to meet the bare necessities for operation. The benefits of right sizing are two-pronged:

• Intuitively allocating resources enable stronger cost savings
• Right sizing resources increases performance in services that might have been neglected, maintains performance in services that might have been overprovisioned

Through right-sizing, companies are able to get a better grasp on their development, enabling teams to prioritize products and services that better serve their customers in the long run.

The merits of right sizing also apply to the concept of scaling. Having your services operate at an optimal level creates room for resource growth once scaling becomes feasible, transforming the often strenuous scaling process into something done with ease. Coupled with the insight provided by around-the-clock monitoring, gone are the days of scaling without a goal in mind; right sizing and monitoring are ushering in a new era of streamlined scale.

Stronger Security 

Cloud spend tools have the ability to bolster your cloud security through price alerts. Once upper and lower thresholds in your cloud spending are passed then users are notified automatically by their monitoring tools. Not only is this extremely beneficial to protect from over and under provisioning, but also can be seen as a way to notify users of potential security leverages if costs become abnormally high.

Cloud Spend Management Tools 

By definition, cloud spend management tools are apps and services designed to help organizations optimize their cloud spending through various means like monitoring and analysis. As huge proponents of open source tech, we would like to categorize these tools as non-open source and open source:

Non Open Source Cloud Spend Management Tools

IBM Turbonomic

IBM Turbonomic is a software platform aimed at optimizing public, private, and hybrid clouds through the use of advanced analytics and AI. Turbonomic delivers on three core tenants: visibility, action, and automation. 

• Visibility: IBM Turbonomic offers a comprehensive service dashboard, equipped with full stack visualization from the greatest app to even the most minute layer
• Action: Turbonomics’ dashboard, coupled with its analytics engine offers actionable insights and recommendations based on your current resource consumption, creating forecasts to prevent further issues
• Automation: Recommendation generated by Turbonomics can automatically be replied, with dynamic resource allocation automatically optimizing your app and infra 

Other features of IBM Turbonomics include evergreen cost optimization through continuous monitoring and automated compliance and cloud governance. With IBM Turbonomic being easily integrated and supported across multiple cloud providers, there’s no wonder why many users flock to this tool.

Flexera One

Flexera One is a SaaS management suite that offers a comprehensive view of an organization’s entire IT estate. From on-premise hardware and software, to cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications, Flexera One compiles all your IT resources into a single interface, enhancing user cost visibility in the meantime. 

Utilizing machine learning and analytics, Flexera One offers a variety of features aimed at efficiently hammering down your costs, including:

• IT asset investment optimization recommendations
• Cost allocation crediting
• Compliance management and automation

And more. 

One of the key features of Flexera One is its attention to detail, with cost allocations being able to go to the most minute level, such as specific projects and workloads.

CloudHealth by VMWare

CloudHealth by VMWare is a multicloud management platform that unifies all of a user’s cloud operations into a single interface. From security and usage, to individual service performance and cost, CloudHealth compiles all the relevant cloud info into a single platform, offering tailored recommendations for each of these aspects. 

Decked out with mainstay features within cloud spend management such as monitoring alerts and dynamic allocation, CloudHealth also offers more unique features like:

• Kubernetes cluster right sizing
• Machine learning forecasting
• Simulated budget tooling
• Automated resource allocation and termination

Along with support for multi cloud environments, CloudHealth has become the go-to cloud spend tool for many.

Open Source Cloud Cost Management Tools

OpenCost

OpenCost is an open source project tasked with smart cloud and container resource allocation. Primarily revolving around Kubernetes, the vendor-neutral tool’s biggest draw is its ability to track costs in real-time and at an extremely granular level, giving you dynamic resource allocation capabilities as necessity arises. Other key features of OpenCost include:

• Dynamic pricing, even in hyperscalers
• Expert support for their service and for on-premise Kubernetes clusters
• Cost monitoring for services like object storage, databases, and more
• Community support and seamless integration with other open source tools

Backed by organizations like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and SUSE, OpenCost was recently inducted into CNCF’s incubation program. The future of this powerful cloud spend tool looks bright!

Komiser

Komiser is an open source platform that offers cloud-agnostic resource management in a single interface. Equipped with monitoring and analytics features, Komiser is essentially a detective within your cloud environment, shedding light on any cost/usage inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities you may have. In doing so, Komiser enables you to manage cloud costs and usage more efficiently.  

Features that Komiser users particularly enjoy include:

• Enhanced resource control and visibility across all platforms
• Security bolster and vulnerability alert and monitoring
• Idle resource termination and reallocation
• Cloud asset inventory building

With a supportive open source community rallying behind this project, Komiser shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to their growth.

All-In-One Cloud Spend Management Platform with Lyrid! 

Your cloud bill shouldn’t be shocking. With the cloud shock bill almost looking like an initiation into the cloud space, many first-time cloud users have simply refused to use cloud at all after that traumatic experience. The relationship between you and your cloud provider shouldn’t be sour, luckily cloud based spend management solutions exist to mediate.

One thing about cloud resources is that they can quickly become overwhelming. A trend amongst many of the solutions and platforms mentioned above is that they compile all your resources into a single platform. The same applies to Lyrid.

Lyrid is an open source, multi cloud solution aimed at making cloud native developments and deployments affordable through automation. Hosting different services like managed Kubernetes, managed databases, object storage, and morel, Lyrid is dedicated to giving you the most amount of power, with a cost that’s competitive to major cloud providers. 

Whether you’re using our Kubernetes or relying solely on databases, a trend within our solutions is visibility and monitoring- we want you to have a deep understanding of what you’re deploying and at what cost you’re doing so. Accompanying these core tenants are features like:

• Autoscaling resources
• Seamless app and provider integration
• Marketplace application enhancements

And so much more. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

‍

If you’re curious about Lyrid and want to learn how to shave your cloud costs down, book a meeting with one of our product specialists!