Welcome to the third edition of our Cloud Cost Optimization newsletter! In this edition, we’ll be focusing on implementing cost management tools.

Cloud providers offer a wide range of cost management tools that can help you optimise your cloud costs. These tools can help you monitor your usage, identify cost savings opportunities, and set budgets and alerts to keep your costs under control. Many companies are not using these features to the maximum and could benefit from a structured implementation of these tools within a cost management governance framework.

Some of the most helpful cost management tools in the AWS domain include:

• Cost Explorer: A tool that visualises and analyses your costs across your entire organisation.
• Trusted Advisor: A tool that recommends optimising costs, improving the security posture, and increasing performance.
• Budgets and alerts: Tools that allow you to set spending thresholds and receive notifications when you’re approaching or exceeding your budget.

Similar tools exist in Azure and Google, and it is also possible to aggregate this information via APIs and scheduled exports into your own data warehouse for further analysis.

In addition to the tools the cloud providers provide, plenty of 3rd party tools on the market can be integrated with the cloud providers and your existing cost management systems.

These tools are worth looking at, especially if running multiple cloud environments. Still, our recommendation would be to utilise the provider tools initially to understand your estate and what you can achieve regarding the visibility of costs before purchasing a 3rd party application.

In a forthcoming edition of this newsletter series, we will look deeper at the options to use data from existing cloud provider tools to provide that aggregated view of your estate and costs.

By implementing these cost management tools, you can gain greater visibility into your cloud usage and identify areas where you can optimise your costs.