Cloudability Reviews

Our client wanted a transparent and visible view of financials in the cloud and that's why we opted for Cloudability Optimization Platform. We are using the solution on AWS.

One of our clients has used Cloudability to get help with rising monthly costs and promote accountability and awareness of cloud spend throughout the different areas of the business. Teams were virtually clueless about how much it was costing to test and develop their respective products. With Cloudability everything is there to see so things can be managed efficiently, saving money and resources.

Transparency and visibility are the key features.

Regarding integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment, it fits in naturally and enhances the overall value as it's "native" to AWS.

We are also able to export data from it and put it in Excel sheets for some of the reporting.

More documentation with more use case scenarios would be nice. Also, the dashboard needs to include more graphs per team to show what individual teams are spending in a given time period.

It's quite mature and stable. We did extensive testing before putting it into production.

As it's in the cloud, scalability is not an issue at all. The environment consists of dozens of VMs.

It justifies the cost and is worth it.

We loved the experience of purchasing this solution through AWS Marketplace. It's very intuitive and cost-efficient. We bought it there because that's where it's available.

I rate it a nine out of ten, as it provides a holistic view of financials and is an enabling technology.

We mostly use it to see stack utilization. Corporate uses it for its break down of teams, who is being charged what, but there are a lot of holes in this. 

For the most part, it is used to determine if the machine is using the rightsizing, etc.

The sizing recommendation will look, and say, "You are only using this at 80%," then recommend a better fit for you.

The sizing recommendations should be done in longer than two week windows. They should be looking at a whole year's worth of information because we get spikes, and once you are out of that window, it doesn't account for it. It will say that you can save money, but the reality is that it wasn't estimated with a longer running cycle and time slice. Also, if you were able to have a year long look at it, then it would be able to do some type of a linear regression model along with some predictive analytics, and say, "You spent this much this year, so we estimate with your growth rate that this is where you will need to be next year without any new features. Right now, I don't think that they do good predictions at all. Some of their competitor's do offer these predictions, so this is an area for improvement.

Therefore, we would like them to have a linear regression, so we can be predictive for budgets, allocations, and the year's follow ups. We also want to have a longer window of analytics with better certainty that our workload will fit the model, not just in a two week window.

With containers, corporate doesn't look at a container level to charge adequately, because things get masked. 

The stability is average. Everybody knows when it is down, which is a good thing.

The scalability is average. It is not terrible, but it is not great. Sometimes things take a while to load, but any analytics that haven't ran in a while need to reboot all their stuff.

We are very big. I don't even know how many EC2 types that we have. As an example, they want us to save $12 million USD a year on budget, and I don't even know what that computes to in compute power.

I have not used technical support.

I was not involved in the integration and configuration of the product.

My team is one of the most expensive teams, and we look at it quite a bit. We have probably easily saved around $400,000 USD a year.

The product is probably not valuable until you are over a certain threshold in compute power. While I don't know what the actual cost is, if you were to say, "We could save you X amount and that would offset the cost of their product, then it is probably starting to be in the realm of being worth it."

We only use the AWS version.

• Cost optimization
• Billing reports

Our clients are now able to get a better insight into their AWS accounts. In this case, they get their own view and can control who has access to that view themselves. It is self-service. It has also given us some capability to do some automation around it during configuration. Therefore, we don't have to manually go and add accounts.

The ability to generate different types of dashboards and being able to make those dashboards available to customers (our users). So each user can have their own dashboard that they want to consume. Instead of having to share one dashboard for multiple users, you can create individual views for each user to view, and that view will contain only their own accounts, which allows for separation of data.

The API is not well-documented. It is not straightforward and difficult to use. This needs to be improved, as it is very difficult for our developers to develop automation around it.

They need to improve their billing data. It seems that sometimes it is not accurate. We have had customers complain that the data they see on the AWS billing dashboard is not reflected (or is very different) from the data that they see in the product. So, there is some discrepancy in the billing reports. I don't know why, but that is one complaint that we see.

Stability is fine. It can handle the reports.

We have hundreds upon hundreds of accounts, and it is able to handle that. 

We don't have any performance issues. Its scalability is fine. I don't have an issue with it.

The technical support is terrible. You can't pick up the phone and talk to somebody. They don't have online chat support. Everything is by email, which is not good.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS was pretty straightforward. AWS has provided their partners with a better way to integrate within their environment. I don't see any issues with it. All you have to do is create an IAM role with a trust policy, and it works.

We also considered Cloud Help. We did not choose it because it was expensive and some of the features that came with it were not what we needed.

We chose Cloudability because of the cost. Another reason was because it supported multiple cloud providers. Based on our evaluation, we also realized that it was easy for our users to consume it and login, because it is integrated it with an identity provider Active Directory. It has single sign-on to our directory.

It is a standalone product, but it does integrate for identity with our other directory. This is pretty straightforward, and it works.

AWS doesn't have a version of this product. Cloudability is a billing and reporting tool. AWS does have capability to provide billing data, but the report and analytics portion of it is not provided by AWS. AWS just provides the data and cloud ability to ingest the data and do the reports.

If you are heavy on automation, then this might not be a good product because the API is not very well-documented. If you need accuracy in your data at the moment, there is some discrepancy in the billing data. So, you should factor that into in your decision.

The primary use is for billing management software. It not only provides detailed billing of everything, but it also provides insight into how to optimize our infrastructure. It tells us where the overruns are and where there are places for optimization.

It has already given us insight into how to optimize. So, we are now ramping up steadily its usage.

It is fast in terms of pulling up data and displaying it.

Cloud Optimization runs through the system, then tells you, "You could've used these resources. This resource was running, but not utilized that much." It gives you metrics of how the whole infrastructure is used. It ties the metrics to building, in some cases saying, "You paid for something that you didn't use that much."

There is always room for improvement in education and training. We are not that mature in terms of our automation. It could help us identify where we could optimize in terms of build.

I haven't seen any stability issues.

We're using a SaaS environment. The SaaS environment has an SLA which automatically scales up depending on our needs, so we don't have to worry about scalability.

I have heard that the technical support is very receptive to providing additional capabilities to whatever the customers needs may be.

We used to have Tableau before, but it is not a building software. We would have to pull the data into Tableau on top of it. Tableau is nice, but the whole process was slow. With Cloudability, the process is  few seconds and you can get what it would have taken several hours for it to download the data in Tableau, then you can massage it and get it up and running.

We chose Cloudability as a solution because it satisfied some of the critical needs of what we wanted:

• We wanted LDAP integration. 
• In terms of core functionality, we wanted to be able to easily slice and dice to be able to see the details of all the charges, which Cloudablity made it very easy to do. 
• The clinching factor was the insight it provided to optimize resources. This was pretty impressive.

It integrated seamlessly.

It is a little too soon to discuss ROI.

I would recommend Cloudability to other people. If you are looking for a seamless, simple to use, and in-depth, cloud, building analysis tooll, Cloudablity serves all these purposes. It manages all my needs.

We are using the AWS SaaS version.

Cloudability helps us with analyzing a lot of our AWS costs, then seeing those different costs with types of business costs. This helps us get a full understanding of where we are spending our money. It also helps us with reserved instances along with recommendations on them.

It provides us visibility, then we can turn around and can give the leadership team more information, which we could not previously give them.

• The Reserved Instance Planner is quite valuable.
  
• It is a SaaS platform that looks at your whole AWS environment.

Cloudability needs to be simplified a bit. It can be quite difficult and daunting when some of my colleagues login for the first time. It is difficult to get their particular reports or dashboards set up. 

It would be interesting if they sort of expanded their rightsizing model. It's doing a good job at the moment, but it doesn't necessarily take into account a lot of edge cases. Thus, if they spent more time on the development of the rightsizing, it would be quite useful.

I've had absolutely no issues with stability.

We put minimal stress on it compared to a lot of other companies. We don't use it quite extensively throughout the whole business. We have only a few different users.

It is a SaaS product. So, we don't have any issues with how it can scale.

We are in three different regions. We have two environments: sound and production. We have 120,000 monthly active users.

We are enterprise customers, so we have a dedicated technical account manager (TAM). 

The technical support has been good, but it is not consistent. Previously, their technical support was very good. They would come in and help with sessions internally. But now, we have dealt with a few people where we ask for one thing and they might not deliver straightaway. It seems like they are a stretched across multiple customers.

The integration with our AWS environment was super easy to do.

We have seen ROI with the reserved instances, and having the ability to predict what reserved instances you can get. We can save tens of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. Having the ability to have those recommendations and buy those purchases helps. If we didn't have Cloudability, we'd still be doing this, and AWS now has their own reserved instance planner. So, we use both. Therefore, we'd still be getting savings without Cloudability, but it is definitely helping us at the moment.

The product is quite interesting. Where we receive a benefit from Cloudability, we now see it more with the AWS offering. They have AWS Cost Explorer, along with the features we like having comprehensive support through AWS. Therefore, Cloudability needs to stay one step ahead of the curve. However, there are a few different parts of Cloudability that we are not fully utilizing yet which we will be utilizing in the future. This means that we are picking up a few more of their features and user adoption in our company will be much greater. 

Define what you really want out of your AWS Cost Explorer, then evaluate all the different options. So, evaluate AWS Cost Explorer first, then determine if you want to use Cloudability.

We use the AWS version of the product. I'm quite happy with most of the product.