10 Free & Paid AWS Cost Optimization Tools You Need To Know About

If you manage your infrastructure in the cloud, you know how important it is to manage your cloud costs. AWS highlights how key cost optimization is by including it in their Well Architected Framework. 

In this blog we examine the pillars of cost optimization, the best tools you can use, how to choose the right tool for you, and how to apply them. 

The 4 Core Pillars of Cloud Cost Optimization

These four pillars represent the key areas of financial management in the cloud.

1 - Customized Cost and Usage Reporting

Having full visibility into your AWS costs enables you to make informed, data-driven decisions.Your engineering, infrastructure, data and/or FinOps teams need real-time and historical data to check details and see what allocated spending was used.

2 - Efficient Billing and Cost Control

Business leaders need to be able to see all spending across AWS accounts. Managers also have to have visibility into credits and billings, so having a breakdown of costs expedites those needs. 

3 - Enhanced Planning with Flexible Forecasting and Budgeting

Managing infrastructure budgets has changed since the cloud has become popular. Teams need to manage dynamic resource forecasting and budgets. In AWS they provide forecasts and apps to manage your costs effectively.

4 - Resource and Pricing Optimization

Manage your costs and continuously improve your spending with AWS. They provide you with different pricing models and resources to improve your performance and efficiency. 

The 10 Best AWS Cost Optimization Tools

There are many tools available on the marke, some are AWS-native as well as a lot of options that were inspired by AWS to create new tools. We’re going to dive 5 AWS-native tools and 5 non-native tools.

AWS Native

AWS has created many tools to help their customers to manage their costs and have more visibility into their environment.

Cost Optimizer

Cost Optimizer for Amazon WorkSpaces analyzes your WorkSpaces usage data and converts your WorkSpace to the most cost-effective billing options. You can use this tool for a single account or multiple accounts. 

Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer allows you to view, understand, and manage all your AWS costs. You can create custom reports that analyze your spending and usage data both for the past and future. Cost Explorer also provides you with business insights in preconfigured dashboards.

Trusted Advisor

You can optimize your costs, improve security, increase performance, and operate at scale using AWS Trusted Advisor. It analyzes your full cloud performance based on AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor also identifies unused resources to improve efficiency. 

CloudWatch

Using CloudWatch you can monitor applications to respond to performance changes, and optimize resource usage. You can set up alarms and automatically react to changes.

It improves your efficiency with automated actions and notifications, and integrates with other AWS services.

Non-AWS

Many people have created software that they find that is missing in AWS to help others to improve their cost optimization.

Stratusphere

Stratusphere was created to combine StratusGrid’s AWS know-how into a single tool. It helps you to take control of your AWS environment(s) and reduce your cloud costs easily.

It provides you with a cost optimization dashboard with actionable insights already prioritized by Level of Effort. Different to the AWS tools above, it enables you to see your entire AWS portfolio in one place and provides you with full context of your spending.

ProsperOps

ProsperOps watches your AWS environment passively and monitors EC2, Lambda, and Fargate. It doesn’t require any interference from you and automatically adjusts your resources to save you money. ProsperOps also provides you with reports to provide your teams with visibility.

Xosphere

Using Xosphere you can manage your spot instances automatically. However, the issue with spot instances is that you either have to make a long-term commitment or use Amazon’s extra space that can be removed quickly.

With Xosphere you optimize your infrastructure costs while maintaining your reliabilit as it automates your spot instances.

Kubecost

Kubecost Cloud works across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It provides you with customizable cost breakdowns, unifies your cost monitoring across those three cloud platforms, and provides you with recommendations to reduce costs based on your usage.

Zesty

With Zesty, you can scale and resize your EBS volumes automatically. This resizing happens during run-time so you don’t have any downtime, view your unified billing, and cut excess capacity. It also integrates with other platforms including Linux and Windows.

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Manage your AWS environment with Tanzu CloudHealth. You can view your spending breakdown, analyze trends, automate daily operations tasks, and the total cost of your AWS migration. It also provides you with rightsizing recommendations and managing your savings plans.

How to Choose the Right Tool for Your Business Needs

To decide what tool will be best for your business you need to decide your priorities and choose a software that aligns with AWS workloads that you currently use.

For instance, if you use spot instances then Xosphere would be better. But if you want a broad view of your AWS environment then Trusted Advisor would be best.

To discover more on how to optimize your costs, read our full guide.

Real-Life Applications of Cost Optimization Tools

To Minimize Cloud Expenses

Ensuring that your cloud costs are at minimum and performance at the maximum is a key aspect of any tool that you choose. For example, choosing bundled discounts within AWS and using software to identify that opportunity.

To Pay Only for What You Use

Some tools can help you to manage your resources so that you only pay for the resources that you use. For instance, using Stratusphere to identify idle EC2 instances and deactivating them.

To Rightsize Workloads

Rightsizing resources ensures that you have complete visibility into how your resources are being used. An example would be adjusting Amazon S3 with cost optimization opportunities using AWS-native tool S3 Storage Lens.

To Modernize Cloud Architecture

Your cloud architecture enables you to scale reliably with microservices. AWS Lambda improves your flexibility and decreases your spending, and different tools can help you to manage that architecture efficiently.

Accelerate Your Cost Optimization Journey with StratusGrid and Stratusphere

Optimizing your costs will optimize your performance, ensuring that you manage your resources more effectively. All the tools mentioned above are great options to improve your visibility and AWS management.

When you partner with StratusGrid for cost optimization we analyze your AWS environment, identify potential improvements and issues. We then align with you on your spending priorities, make adjustments, and monitor your spending. 

Our tool Stratusphere also enables you to manage your costs independently using its Level of Effort actionable insights.