AWS Cost Explorer only tells partial story. Want the whole truth and take action? Use Aquila Clouds.

Public cloud vendors have realized their customers are wary of cloud overspending, and thus started to provide some basic tooling to help their customers on that front. AWS Cost Explorer is one such example. It gives you visibility to what costs have incurred in summary graphs, and what it thinks will cost you in the future based on your current usage pattern. And yet the cost information may not be sufficient to make operational decisions, e.g. which instances are under-utilized but still consuming running hours. In this blog post we will provide you with some details on what Aquila Clouds can help you gain more insights on your cloud environments and take actions to improve your cloud costs. We expedite the whole cycle of assessment, decisions and actions for you in a simple and automated fashion.

Cost visibility

 

Cost dashboard showing savings opportunities

Aquila Clouds provides a comprehensive coverage of cost visibility on both aggregate and granular levels; we provide a mechanism for you to group related instances to show their costs as a unit. Grouping criteria can be the same business service, same department, serving the same feature(s) of a SaaS product, etc. The cost breakdown by these groups is not just useful for cloud operations. SaaS product managers can use this information for their planning and budgeting for each new release as well.

 

Manual grouping shown by costs

For organizations that leverage containers, ECS, EKS and Kubernetes, Aquila Clouds gives you a cost break-down view for all your containers and across the spectrum of container orchestration services.

 

Aquila helps you understand your cloud cost breakdown on the resource level, e.g. compute, or storage. This breakdown is not available on AWS Cost Explorer and you will have to go through the line items carefully on your monthly bills.

We raise alerts on instance groups and individual instances in respect to the thresholds you have set. You can then control budgets on various levels, not just the overall bill. These alerts can also be sent to you via PagerDuty and other alerting ecosystems.

Decisions based on utilization, not just high level costs

With AWS Cost Explorer you can correlate the cloud costs with the number of EC2 running hours. And yet it does not tell you whether those EC2 instances are truly being used, and whether they are over-provisioned. This way you can truly make a conscious decision on the next step, be it to shutdown some instances or to downsize some instances.

On the storage level we also provide you with a list of over-provisioned IOPS, unattached or orphaned volumes. You can choose to scale down your over-provisioned IOPS, or delete the unattached or orphaned volumes. All of these decisions can help you curb your cloud overspending.

 
Clean up unattached volumes, old snapshots, and over-provisioned IOPS volumes

One-click actions for cost optimization

Action speaks louder than words. With all the insights Aquila Clouds provides you, you can put your decisions in action through one-click. For example, if you want to downsize an instance, on our Actions tab, you can just click on the button associated with that instance and choose to downsize. All of the associated operations are then performed automatically for you.

 
Rightsize your instances within one click

For organizations that follow a predictable working schedule, they can set the startup and shutdown times on an hourly basis on a certain weekday. For DevOps departments, this feature can easily translate to 60% to 80% savings.

 
Schedule startup and shutdown of your instances to save

Conclusion

Public cloud vendors do try to provide you with some bells and whistles to help you navigate your costs. Nevertheless their attempts will likely fall short since their best interest is for you to use more of their larger instance types.

Aquila Clouds helps you visualize where you are incurring the costs on multiple clouds, and make decisions on both aggregate and granular levels. Our single pane of glass will prove to not just save you on cloud costs, but also on cloud operations costs. We simplify the whole process of assessment, decision and action, so that you and your team members can easily control your cloud footprints while achieving the desired performance. Our RBAC (role-based access control) feature ensures that only authorized personnel can perform the right actions for your cloud deployments.

Try Aquila Clouds for free, click here.