Use These Tools to Optimize your AWS Costs

Tools For Optimizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Costs

Cloud services, AWS especially comes with a bunch of resources and features that can both enhance your experience and on the other hand, be a little bit pricey.

Generally, the various Amazon Web Service cost optimization tools can be grouped into two broad groups, considering their functions.

Efficiently predicting the cost of cloud services offered by the Amazon Web Services(AWS) platform can be challenging and tricky.

Sequel to the previous AWS Cost Optimization Checklist, in this article, I’ll walk you through various AWS cost estimation and optimization tools. Ranging from;

• Amazon Provided Tools to
• Third-Party Amazon Web Service Cost Optimization tools

that will help you seamlessly and effectively manage your Amazon Web Services costs.

Amazon Provided Tools

Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that helps visualize costs and usage data in an intuitive and interactive interface.

Data from Cost Explorer helps to analyze cost and usage across all AWS accounts, help to identify trends, cost consumption, and detect usage spikes.

The tool which can also be easily accessed from your preferred analytics tool presents you data from the last 12 months.

AWS Instance Scheduler

Using data from cost explorer, the Amazon instance scheduler tool helps you to automatically stop Amazon EC2 and Amazon Relational Database Service(RDS) instances.

It also helps to scale and schedule Amazon Web Services EC2  based on your expected utilization pattern, requirements, and needs.

Amazon CloudWatch

Considering a variety of metrics from your Amazon services, CloudWatch helps you set alarms for specified resource levels.

For example, you can set an alarm to be notified when your EC2 instances go below, say 40%.

When notified by the alarm, you can easily analyze and investigate instance underutilization and proportionally resize or combine the workloads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Budgets

AWS Budgets allows you to specify the budget for specific Amazon services. The budget can also be connected to specific data like data usage or instance to increase effectiveness. You can receive notifications of AWS Budget events through emails or as messages from the Simple Notification Service (SNS).

Amazon Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor offers a range of functionalities which include optimizing your AWS infrastructure, increasing security and performance, and reducing your overall cost optimization.

This analyzes your AWS environment and provides best practice recommendations in security, fault tolerance, performance, service limits, and cost optimization.

Cost and Usage Report Tool

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cost Usage and Report tool present an hourly, daily, or monthly comprehensive report of your AWS cost, usage, services pricing, and other data.

AWS CloudTrail

CloudTrail allows you to monitor, manage and log reports from your Amazon Web Service on the go. This tool keeps you alerted when there is an unusual surge in activities that may increase costs and lets you act accordingly.

Third-Party Cost Optimization Tools

Total Cloud

Total cloud is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud management and scheduling SaaS tool.

It schedules every AWS resource including Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), Redshift, Elasticache, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

It has a 15-day free trial for 1 AWS account, managing up to 20 resources.

The paid option starts from $49 and it can be bought directly from AWS Marketplace.

Komiser

Komiser is an Open Source cloud Optimization and Analytics tool.

The tool helps to analyze, manage and control cloud cost, usage, security from a simple but intuitive interface.

The software comes in a free community edition (Komiser CE) and a paid enterprise edition(Komiser EE) starting from $169/month.

Metricly

Metricly (also CloudWisdom) is a feature-rich third-party Amazon Web Service cost-saving tool. It offers in-depth cost and capacity analysis, billing analysis, capacity monitoring, and AWS right-sizing features.

Metricly also helps in choosing the right Amazon EC2 instances for your project.

It offers a 21-day free trial and a paid version starting from $10/month billed annually.

Cloudability

Cloudability cloud cost management, visibility, and optimization tool that analyzes your AWS account and gives recommendations to increase cost-effectiveness.

It helps to easily view and automate recommended cost optimizing tasks like rightsizing and instance scheduling.

Cloudability also allows you to set your AWS usage rate and trigger points to purchase reserved instances (RI) for your EC2 thereby maximizing the utilization rate.

It offers a 30-day free trial and various paid plans starting from $499 per month with no free version.

ParkMyCloud

With an easy to use interface, ParkMyCloud helps to efficiently schedule, optimize costs and manage various Amazon Web Service resources.

The cost optimizing system automatically turns resources off when they’re not needed, saving an average of 65%.

Eliminating cost wastage and maximizing savings, ParkMyCloud offers a free resource scheduling version, usable for 1 AWS account.

Other paid options differ based on the number of instances needed and other cost optimizing features, starting from $3 per instance with the Scheduling and SmartParking features. Check out their various pricing plans here.

GorillaStack Cost Optimization Tool

GorillaStack cost Optimization tool optimizes AWS costs by scheduling a variety of resources to improve elasticity and reduce wastage.

GorillaStack claims to reduce costs by automation actions involving Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), lambda, and more.

Pricing for the basic usage tier starts from $50 per month and a 14-day free trial offer.

FrugalBot

FrugalBot is an Amazon Web Services continuous cost optimization measuring tool.

In a day-to-day format, this tool delivers metrics that help to measure the effectiveness of AWS cost optimization efforts.

Pricing information can be viewed on Amazon Marketplace.

TrackIT

TrackIt is a Saas tool that analyzes, manages, and optimizes AWS cloud products and visualizes them.

The tool presents AWS usage, cost, and performance insights and makes recommendations for smart cost optimization.

TrackIt comes in a free cost monitoring package and a $40 per month standard cost monitoring and optimization package.

Cloud Custodian

Cloud Custodian is a lightweight open source and basic cloud management tool.

The simple YAML DSL allows you to set up simple rules to easily manage and optimize AWS cost.

Cloud Custodian free and open source, allowing it to be flexible and safe.

CloudHealth

CloudHealth by VMware is a multi-cloud platform that provides comprehensive cost management, helps to automate day-to-day cloud operation, and reports security status.

It integrates seamlessly with Amazon Web Service (AWS) with an interactive interface to aid cost optimization efforts.

Cloudhealth offers a free trial after which you can request a price quote for their paid services, depending on your cloud needs here.