AWS Cost Management Reviews

We have all of our virtual machines on AWS, so we use the AWS Cost Management tool to track our spending. It helps us to understand our bill.

This solution did not allow us to design the budget for each project internally. In any case, we have gained an understanding of the cost of common resources for each of our projects. But we are looking at different market solutions such as CloudHealth or Cloudability.

All of the reporting features are good, as they allow us to track monthly expenses.

This solution needs to be easier for non-technical people to understand their budget. Some people from Business or from Finance do not find the tool easy enough to use. By comparison, there are other tools that make it easier to involve the entire team because they are dedicated solely to the financial aspect. Essentially, I want a platform that is easily accessible by everybody in the company and that is not the case with the tools from AWS.

I would like to have a better and easier accessibility using SSO.

We need finer-grained control over the roles and policies for users, specifying their permissions as to what they can look at.

We have been using the AWS Cost Management tool for two months.
It is this solution that give us trusted data.

This is a stable solution. It has been in development for a number of years and has matured.

This is a SaaS solution and it is scalable.

I have not been in touch with technical support. Instead, we rely on our in-house expertise.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is time-consuming. For external Tier of solutions, we have to configure roles and policies, an s3 bucket with Costs Usage and Report (CUR) for handling all of the resources that we manage. These include read-only permission for some users and roles. In our company, we have a lot of accounts. I use Terraform to assist with this process instead of doing it all manually.

We have three people in my team, but there is a group of up to ten people who will have to deal with FinOps issues.

One last thing without good AWS resource tagging and compliance, It will be impossible for you to have a detailed view on costs

This is the de facto solution, so we did not evaluate other products before choosing it. However, we are currently searching for another solution because there are a lot of missing things that we need. For example, we want something simple that has one single point for login. We would also like something that is easier for non-technical people to use.

It would be helpful to have a feature that helps to write a budget. For example, you supply a budget of $10,000 and it will show you what you can do with that over a period of time. It would allow you to find cost-savings based on the resources that you need.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I think everything about the solution is fine. Overall, it's a good product.

The stability and scalability are good.

The cost management portion of the solution should be improved.

I'm not able to get the savings online and have already budgeted my current account. I need to see every single cost in a dynamic way. The main problem with the CUR is it's not able to provide me that many detailed tasks that I can provide it to my management when I am expanding the amount. That is my major problem.

The solution needs to have its own dashboard for seeing details on it. It should be customizable as well so I have the ability to pull up the information I need to see and have it in one place for my reference. I should just be able to click and see everything I need in one step.

It would be helpful if they categorized the data. The amount of data isn't small, so it would help if I could organize it to help me find the information I need.

With parenting accounts, the solution should offer the capability to enter RI.

I've been working with the solution for about four years.

The stability of the solution is nice.

The solution is very scalable. We have no problems handling that aspect of the solution.

There are about 100 people using the solution within our organization.

We've had experience reaching out to technical support. They're quite fine. We haven't had any issues with them. We're happy with the level of service they provide.

We didn't previously use any similar products. AWS Cost Management is the first solution of its kind that we are using.

The initial setup is quite easy. It's not complex at all. Deployment is very fast. It only takes about five minutes.

I had to set up multi-accounts, however, both a parent account and then child accounts. That kind of thing was tough, to work through that part of the setup.

Users should go for this solution if they don't need to have multi-account architecture. That's basically the only advice I have.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The solution gives access to retail information about the AWS Cost and view stages and their organization of the information is great. The tutorials on the owning of the SaaS approach are very good; they understand the underlying approach, costs, and trends. 

The solution is really organized. It's one thing I really like about it.

The cost of the solution could be improved.

The solution needs to improve the communication mechanism available to the stakeholders. 

They could expand a little in places that check on the cost explorer. Virtualization and other similar features should be more flexible on the dashboard. 

The dashboard could use improvement. It would be better if there was color coding that you can adjust, for example.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The stability of the solution is good. I've never had issues with it.

The scalability of the solution depends on the load. It allows for horizontal and vertical scaling. All non-partial requirements are pretty broad for the solution. Right now, eight people are on it. They're all directors.

Technical support for AWS is perfect.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's not complex at all.

We largely work with the cloud deployment model.

I'd recommend the solution and I'd encourage others to go for it. You don't need to do planning. They're very helpful.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for AWS Cost Management is to manage costs. One of the financial institutes that we assisted once, incurred a 40-45 million dollar pay quarter on data center costs and moving into Azure. AWS Cost Management brought that down to $45 million for an entire year. 

It is one of the oldest templates on cloud. They shape it to fit any implementation requirement, so you could almost have a template for absolutely anything that you have on-premises that you want to move into the cloud.

Our specialization is optimization. So we optimize the infrastructure before it moves into the cloud so that the deployment in the cloud is okay. If you use the wrong template, AWS will charge you more, or for a bigger workload than it does for on-premises. And that's why we use it on-premises.

What Amazon is trying to do, is to put everything into their cloud and show the customer costs. I suppose that's a good sales pitch, but I don't believe that a single cloud provider can do it for every customer. I think that, with Microsoft being so prevalent in the market, they have a space and their cost management model is much more effective.

For example, I don't believe Amazon's version of SQL is very efficient. So they can definitely beef up.

I have been using AWS Cost Management for two years now.

This program is not very scalable.

We do our own technical support, because we've got all the skills. All our guys are certified technicians. 

We've used a solution called vROps. We used it for determining what our workloads were and so on. But the problem with vROps is that, when you start using it in an enterprise mode, it becomes hellishly expensive to run in major enterprises. That is why we changed over to AWS Cost Management.

The initial setup wasn't complex at all. They make the ability to show the cost on cloud solutions very, very easy. They use a tool that I don't believe is very effective because what they do, is to do a workload analysis of the on-prem cloud solutions. And then this tool is meant to determine what workloads are running where and if they're running efficiently and so on. I don't believe that to be very efficient. But that's what they do.

Cloud solutions exist because of costs and efficiency optimization. Those are the key parameters for going to the top, otherwise you just have it on-premises and carry on running it the way you are.

Being able to do absolutely every part of the technology from your disaster recovery solution to your backup, to your cloud adoption, the cloud integration, your application integration is a service. So everything is done as a service. It's a more cost effective way of informing and telling the business how they manage their costs or their money.

My advice to others looking into implementing this solution, would be to go for it. They should bite the bullet at the beginning and spend the money, because it will help the organization in managing that cost for adoption for the entire lifetime of that cloud solution.

An additional feature that I would you like to see included in the next release, is automation. Part of what cost management is to determine the best way to use a solution, a cloud or a workload. Those workloads have the storage association. They have CPU association and they have computer association. What AWS Cost Management needs, is a backend into an optimization tool that can automatically manage your resources so that you don't over-spend on resources.

My rating for this solution would be a six out of ten.