The Top DevOps Tools For Cloud Cost Optimization

A few weeks ago, Peter Shi (the main man when it comes to Cost Optimization strategy for AWS in APAC) ran an awesome workshop on DevOps. Participants from some of the largest organizations in Australia took part in discussing and recommending their most treasured DevOps tools when it comes to cloud cost optimization.

For our synopsis, we split the tools and into 6 main buckets:

1. Cloud Discovery & Migration
2. Cloud Cost Optimization & Resource Recommendations
3. Tagging & Allocation
4. Logs & Events
5. Cloud Automation
6. Spot Instance Management

If you have experience with any of these tools and want to give feedback or if you think we’ve missed anything, we’d love to hear from you on our Slack Channel!

Discovery & Migration

Application Discovery Service

Vendor: AWS

AWS Application and Discovery service help organizations that are planning a migration to identify and map applications that are running on-prem.

Armed with that information, organizations can plan for what their new environment will look like once it moves into the cloud using other migration tools.

Database Migration Service

Vendor: AWS

Migrate databases to AWS using AWS Database Migration Service. One major upside is that the database remains fully functional during migration so there’s minimal downtime.

Database Migration Service allows you to migrate data from most major databases including Oracle, Microsoft SQL, IBM and many more.

Import / Export Calculator

Vendor: AWS

Use AWS Import / Export Calculator to figure out the cost for transferring data into and out of S3 buckets. A simple tool and highly recommended in advance of a large data migration to plan out your costs.

Migration Hub

Vendor: AWS

AWS Migration hub allows you to track migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. Use Migration Hub to choose the most appropriate tools and plan in advance of any migration work.

Track progress and performance of your migrations in one single spot.

Server Migration Service

Vendor: AWS

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations.

Simple Monthly Calculator

Vendor: AWS

Arguably more complicated than the Import / Export calculator, the Simple Monthly calculator allows you to estimate charges over a range of AWS services. Be prepared with all of your projected service usage before using it.

Once you have a good idea of your use cases, you’ll find the SMC incredibly powerful for estimating your charges going forward.

Snowball

Vendor: AWS

Snowball is a hardware device that organizations can use to load massive amounts of data into and send off to Amazon. It’s available with 80TB of storage in all regions and also with 50TB in the US regions.

Encrypted data is loaded into the Snowball before the hardware is sent off to Amazon for transfer into the cloud. The predominant advantage of Snowball is that you’re not transferring data over the internet. Hence, you can gain significant time and money savings.

TCO Calculator

Vendor: AWS

Less granular than the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator, use the TCO calculator for a high level pricing overview. You can use it to compare AWS Total Cost of Ownership vs On-Prem and other hosting options.

Rsync

Vendor: Samba [Open Source]

Organizations use this open source tool along with 3rd party file system tools to copy data directly into S3 buckets.

AppDynamics APM

Vendor: Cisco

AppDynamics APM automatically discovers, maps, and visualizes your critical customer journeys through each application service and infrastructure dependency. Teams have a single source of truth to focus on end-to-end performance in the context of the customer experience, instead of monitoring individual services.

ATASphere & ATAMotion

Vendor: Deloitte

Deloitte ATASphere provides service delivery partners and enterprise customers a way to map, manage, migrate & protect an any-to-any combination of applications across data centers, hypervisors, private clouds and public clouds.

Cloudamize

Vendor: Cloudamize

Before any migration, you can use Cloudamize to project TCO, breakdown your costs, map your workloads and forecast your expenses.

Cloudcraft

Vendor: Cloudcraft

A simple but powerful tool for visually designing and mapping your AWS environment and infrastructure.

CloudEndure Live Migration

Vendor: CloudEndure

Manages the process of migration to AWS with automation including block-level replication, automated machine conversion, and application stack orchestration.

ScienceLogic

Vendor: ScienceLogic

Discovers and maps infrastructure for classification and analysis in anticipation of migration into the cloud.

Device42

Vendor: Device42

Before a cloud migration, use Device42 to identify and track the logical components, relationships and interdependencies in your environment.

Hava

Vendor: Vibrato

Using a read-only policy, you can plug Hava into your environment to get a diagram of your network infrastructure back immediately.

New Relic APM & Infrastructure

Vendor: New Relic

Combine New Relic APM and Infrastructure for a clear idea of your infrastructure, enabling ops and dev teams to get on the same page.

Post migration you can track changes to your environment and the effects of those changes.

TSO Logic

Vendor: TSO Logic

TSO logic plugs into your environment to create an extremely granular view of what it might cost to migrate the environment to the cloud. It uses AI and statistical models to examine the compute, rightsize, and OS requirements before migration.

Once the analysis is complete, you can use the output for a roadmap. Also, the analysis will provide a how-to for setting up best practices in setting up a new rightsized and appropriately provisioned environment in the cloud.

Cloud Cost Optimization & Resource Recommendations

If you’re looking to control your cloud spend, read 7 weird ways to reduce your AWS bill.

Budgets

Vendor: AWS

Use AWS Budgets to set custom alerts for costs and usage according to budgets. You can slice and dice those alerts by AWS service, tag & linked account.

Receive alerts via email or SNS if you want to trigger environmental changes. You can even track RI utilization to get a high level overview of how your RI purchases are going. With this information, you can decide whether or not you need to adjust your buying strategy.

Cost & Usage Report

Vendor: AWS

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) lists the cost of every line item in AWS by account and user. The line items can be broken down hourly, daily or monthly. Further, the report can be filtered by tags

The CUR can be consumed as a CSV file that is written to an S3 bucket and also programmatically via API.

Cost Explorer

Vendor: AWS

AWS Cost Explorer provides straightforward graphical data about your AWS spend across all services and accounts. Great use of this tool is the breakdown of spending over time. This way, you can see how you are tracking your cloud spend across a month and identify cycles. Spend can also be filtered and grouped by dimensions such as product and tag.

There are a few reports that are particularly useful. For instance, further breakdown of EC2 spend, Reserved Instance (RI) recommendations, RI Utilization, and RI savings.

EC2 Rightsizing

Vendor: AWS

Not so much a tool as a CloudFormation template. You can deploy the EC2 Rightsizing solution to analyze the last 2 weeks of utilization data. You then can use it to identify candidate instances for rightsizing.

With such a range of instance size and types available, this is a good first pass at figuring out any obvious choices before delving into some of the more granular focused paid tools.

Trusted Advisor

Vendor: AWS

To get access to the best parts of Trusted Advisor, you’ll need to pay for premium support. Trusted advisor provides key recommendations around rightsizing and underutilized resources as well as making recommendations around RI purchases.

Like many of the AWS products, a good first step before getting into some of the deeper toolsets to solve the cost optimization challenge.

Simple Monthly Calculator

Vendor: AWS

The Simple Monthly calculator is more of a projection forward than a report of historical usage. It allows you to estimate charges if you’re looking to make changes over a range of AWS services.

If you figure out your projected use cases you’ll find the SMC incredibly powerful for estimating your charges going forward.

Systems Manager

Vendor: AWS

AWS Systems manager gives DevOps engineers a unified view of resource groups.

You can view detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, software installations, application configurations, and other details about your environment through the Systems Manager dashboard

Squeegee

Vendor: Atlassian [Open Source]

Squeegee is the brainchild of Atlassian and is Open Source. The code enriches and stores CUR data in parquet files in S3. Using that, it that can be queried using AWS Athena and visualized using BI tools.

Trusted Overlord

Vendor: Beeva [Open Source]

Manage your Trusted Advisor Alarms, AWS Health notifications and AWS Support cases all in one place with Open Source Code.

Consigliere

Vendor: News Corp [Open Source]

Consigliere is a simple and effective Open Source Code from News Corp. It allows you to aggregate your Trusted Advisor data into one account.

Ice

Vendor: Teevity [Open Source]

Ice is Open Source Code that was originally conceived by Netflix but is now maintained by Teevity.

Ice gives organizations a high level view of their spend (including Reserved Instances). It also allows them to drill down at a very granular level for point-in-time analysis and trend usage patterns.

Apptio Cloud Cost Management

Vendor: Apptio

Apptio Cloud Cost Management is a tool that allows users to understand, map and allocate their cloud costs and usage.

It can also also identify underutilized and idle instances which users can then implement to make cost savings.

Cloudability

Vendor: Cloudability

Cloudability gives the financial departments of organizations full transparency around cost allocation to departments and resources. The software makes clear recommendations around optimization to ensure infrastructure is running at the best possible price.

They have a Reserved Instance planner and recommendations around rightsizing for underutilized instances.

CloudCheckr

Vendor: CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr gives you visibility around the security and cost usage of your cloud. Targeted for DevOps, SecOps and FinOps team, CloudCheckr gives you configurable view to optimize spend and eliminate waste in your environments.

Additionally, CloudCheckr empowers organizations to undertake cost allocation across internal groups and has a small degree of self-healing automation.

Cloud Conformity

Vendor: Cloud Conformity

Cloud Conformity focuses primarily on security but provides broad and useful insights for cost visibility. They have an interesting and compelling model where they take AWS best practices and map your environment against those key recommendations.

Their product simplifies bill visibility. It also analyzes usage trends to provide insights, recommendations, and spend projections that can be filtered by regions, accounts, tags, and projects.

CloudHealth

Vendor: CloudHealth

CloudHealth is a heavy duty tool for cloud visibility, cloud cost management, resource utilization visibility and governance.

Like many of the other tools, CloudHealth allows users to break down the cloud spend by a number of variables. In this way, organizations can manage their spend by tag, region, account or project.

CloudSqueeze

Vendor: CloudSqueeze

CloudSqueeze is a lightweight tool that analyzes an environment’s utilization and returns graphs for feedback to the user. Additionally, CloudSqueeze can make some high level recommendations around utilization and rightsizing.

Cloudwiry

Vendor: Cloudwiry

Cloudwiry is another lightweight tool that allows users to monitor their AWS accounts spend in customizable dashboard and graphs.

Cloudwiry also makes recommendations for changes that users can make to their environments for cost optimization.

Densify

Vendor: Cloe

Densify uses artificial intelligence & machine learning to analyze cloud usage patterns and recommend performance optimizations.

Their Cloud Optimization Engine establishes predictive demand patterns. With that, it uses these patterns to create models and optimize supply to the demands of your cloud environment.

Metricly

Vendor: Metricly

Primarily a monitoring tool, Metricly analyzes billing and performance data to give users cost visibility with filtering, sorting and recommendations.

The tool can also detect usage pattern changes. It alerts you if anything unusual is anticipated in the bill before it becomes a problem.

ActOnMagic

Vendor: NTT

ActOnCloud by ActOnMagic has a mixture of features. Along with a spend analyzer, it has a “Trusted Fixer”, empowering users to fix resource leakages and to rightsize.

The software provides billing alerts and auto scaling, as well as deeper monitoring with server alerts.

Beam

Vendor: Nutanix

Botmetric, acquired by Nutanix, is now known as “Beam”. Beam gives organizations analysis and visibility of their cloud consumption. In addition to that, it provides the ability to execute recommended changes with one click.

Organizations can set budgets that are used to monitor and control usage. It can break down spend by teams, tags, account & region.

Nuvola Analytics

Vendor: Nuvola Analytics

Nuvola is a platform that gives you visibility over your cloud consumption. Interestingly they set KPIs for how they think your cloud should be performing and measure you against them.

The platform provides rightsizing recommendations and the ability to predict how your costs will track and evolve over time. You can set budgets and get alerts when things are shaping to get out of hand.

Optima

Vendor: RightScale

RightScale Optima unifies visibility across all your clouds and then allows you to filter by account, team, app or tags. Organizations can use this information for chargeback and showback.

Businesses use the product to identify underutilized resources and optimize further by predicting costs and provisioning accordingly.

Scalr

Vendor: Scalr

Scalr provides cost visibility and actionable steps that you can take to create meaningful cost optimization. By breaking costs down to an application layer, users can truly optimize with all the facts at hand.

With Scalr, you can set policies around budgets and resource types to create a safe environment for developers. They can then operate without fear of overspending or stepping outside of the guardrails.

PyraCloud

Vendor: SoftwareONE (GorillaStack was acquired by SoftwareOne)

PyraCloud empowers organizations to manage and control spend. You can define business units and establish budgets to track and optimize spend throughout the organization across all cloud resources.

Splunk

Vendor: Splunk

While chiefly a monitoring tool, Splunk can give users visibility over your resources and how they relate to each other.

Splunk also has dashboards for tracking the costs of AWS usage over time. With the dashboard, users gain insight into unused resources and allowing them to track against budget.

Stax

Vendor: Versent

Stax empowers organizations to allocate cost by business unit, tag, application and instance. Organizations can track their usage across the month and how it compares to budget.

What differentiates Stax from a number of others in this category is its wastage reports. It shows across a number of services, exactly where there is wastage and how to solve identified issues.

Wavefront

Vendor: VMware

Use Wavefront’s AWS monitoring analytics to create dashboards that bring into one place CloudWatch, CloudTrail and native AWS cost reports. Once the dashboards are in place, you can identify over provisioned resources and optimize cost.

Cloudamize

Vendor: Cloudamize

Cloudamize serves beyond as a migration planning tool. It allows you to identify which resources are ripe for rightsizing and how to get optimal performance at optimal cost.

One cool thing about the product is to plan and forecast with multiple scenarios. For example, you can model different regions, pricing plans and instance types.

Actionable Advisories

Vendor: FittedCloud

Receive actionable notifications from FittedCloud which can be executed to optimize cost and improve infrastructure efficiency.

Continuous Optimization

Vendor: Yotascale

Yotascale uses machine learning and AI to continuously monitor your environment and make actionable downsizing recommendations.

Cloud Tagging & Allocation

Tag Editor

Vendor: AWS

AWS Tag Editor should be your go to for tagging and editing the tags of resources on an ad-hoc basis. Its available in the Console but doesn’t provide automation like some of its paid and OSS competitors.

Graffiti Monkey

Vendor: Answers 4 AWS [Open Source]

Graffiti monkey is a handy piece of open source code for managing EC2 and EBS. It looks at EC2 instances and copies its tags to any attached EBS Volumes and subsequent snapshots of those EBS volumes.

Cloud Custodian

Vendor: Capital One [Open Source]

Cloud Custodian by Capital One is another piece of Open Source Code. Out of the box, you can use Cloud Custodian to stop any resource in 4 days if it does not meet tagging compliance policies but obviously customize it to your needs.

GorillaStack AutoTag

Vendor: GorillaStack [Open Source]

Use GorillaStack AutoTag to automatically tag any resource tag with the user that created it. This piece of open source code means your users will always be responsible for the resources they provision.

Cloudability

Vendor: Cloudability

Among its other strengths, Cloudability allows organizations to heavily customize how they want to allocate costs. The tool is very much designed for FinOps teams to visualize by resource, application, tag and application.

CloudCheckr

Vendor: CloudCheckr

As with Cloudability, CloudCheckr users can allocate cost centers and break down spend within an environment based on tags. With most of these allocation tools, it is recommended that you have a good tagging policy in place at the start. If not, you can use one of the open-source tools to apply tagging in a consistent fashion.

CloudHealth

Vendor: CloudHealth

CloudHealth provides 2 distinct ways to unravel and visualize cost, allocating either by resource and or allocating by tag. The resource allocation methodology is incredibly granular but involves custom work, in particular with the Detailed Billing Record.

Also, CloudHealth allows user to view cost center by tag and is the recommended place to start before investing in a deeper dive.

PyraCloud

Vendor: SoftwareONE

PyraCloud Custom Group Manager allows customers to organize cloud workloads and environments into business units and cost centers. Organizations can define the hierarchy based on internal reporting needs.

Once defined, the resources can be grouped to business units and cost centers. Organizations can effectively govern, budget, track spend and charge back cloud costs to the various business units.

Logs & Events

CloudTrail

Vendor: AWS

AWS CloudTrail is an audit log of almost all the events that take place inside your AWS environment. You can consume the events in a number of different fashions. The most popular is to push them to an S3 bucket for inspection.

With CloudTrail, organizations can look at user & resource activity allowing for deeper analysis and troubleshooting. Particularly when encountering issues with an AWS environment.

CloudWatch

Vendor: AWS

AWS CloudWatch can be used to monitor a number of services and applications that run inside an organizations AWS environment. CloudWatch gives organizations oversight of the whole cloud environment with feedback around resource utilization, application performance and operational health.

CloudWatch allows for the monitoring of EC2, DynamoDB, EBS, RDS, and many more services. You can also monitor custom metrics for applications via API. One of the most popular use cases is for metrics to trigger alarms. With the triggers, it can then be used to kick off other automated actions.

Config

Vendor: AWS

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations. It also allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations.

With Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources. You can then dive into detailed resource configuration histories. With that, you can determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. This enables you to simplify compliance auditing, security analysis, change management, and operational troubleshooting.

Trusted Advisor

Vendor: AWS

As a logging tool, Trusted Advisor works best when combined with CloudWatch. CloudWatch can be used to report on changes in Trusted Advisor.

Along with Trusted Advisor, you can use these CloudWatch alarms to send alarms and notifications. With these alerts, you can use it trigger changes that remediate your environment.

Trusted Overlord

Vendor: Beeva [Open Source]

Manage your Trusted Advisor Alarms, AWS Health notifications and AWS Support cases all in one place with Open Source Code.

Datadog

Vendor: Datadog

Datadog is an enterprise grade monitoring and analytics solution that ingests events from across the full stack of an organization. From there, users can log, analyze and display their events to ascertain meaningful insights about their application performance.

Also, Datadog can be used to parse and filter critical events. Using these filtered events, you can create alerts that notify and/or trigger automation processes for remedy or similar.

GorillaStack CloudTrail Listener For Slack

Vendor: GorillaStack

Thousands of organizations use GorillaStack’s free CloudTrail Listener for slack to filter CloudTrail events. In Slack, they can receive notifications around specific events that are useful to the end-user.

Valuable metadata is attached to each event. Notifications can be allocated on a user by user basis and ensured that critical events only go to the assigned Slack user.

ScienceLogic

Vendor: ScienceLogic

ScienceLogic monitors multiple platforms and provides tools to create alerts for specific combinations of events that are of importance. Organizations can escalate and distribute alerts based on their requirements.

Splunk

Vendor: Splunk

Splunk collects data to provide application and performance analytics. Splunk gives businesses the tools to improve uptime, identify technical issues and detect security breaches.

Splunk’s graphical tools enable straightforward consumption and visualization of data logs in a single pane.

Sumo Logic

Vendor: Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native, machine data analytics service for log management and time series metrics. A SaaS product, it enables IT teams to monitor and analyze logs across AWS. It can be used to promote security & compliance as well as best practice incident management & troubleshooting.

Cloud Automation

Auto Scaling

Vendor: AWS

Until recently, only available for EC2 instances, you can now use Auto Scaling to automatically adjust capacity to meet the demands put on your services.

You can confidently maintain performance by setting minimum, maximum and desired volume of services to meet spikes and troughs in usage.

Budgets

Vendor: AWS

You can use AWS Budgets to send an SNS topic when a cost threshold is exceeded in your AWS account. From there, the SNS topic can be leveraged to trigger automation flows and remedy the issue (i.e. a flow that turns off or scales down a service).

Config

Vendor: AWS

AWS Config allows businesses to trigger SNS topics when resource configurations deviate from the policies set out by an organization. Again, these SNS topics can be used to send alerts or trigger flows that remediate any such deviation.

Instance Scheduler

Vendor: Instance Scheduler

Instance Scheduler is a CloudFormation template that can be used to schedule instances to turn on and off. Users have to set up a stack and the scheduler requires a fair bit of configuration and maintenance to get working and manage ongoing.

Systems Manager

Vendor: AWS

AWS Systems Manager is a tool for automating tasks on EC2 instances such as patches, updates and configurations changes. It has some built-in presets but can be heavily customized by experienced end-users.

Backup Monkey

Vendor: Answers 4 AWS [Open Source]

Backup Monkey is a simple Open Source python script that’s takes backups of EBS volumes.

Cloud Custodian

Vendor: Capital One [Open Source]

Cloud Custodian is an Open Source project from Capital One. Users can create policies around encryption and access and tagging. Most importantly Cloud Custodian automates cost optimization by deleting unused resource and power cycling.

BidElastic

Vendor: BidElastic

BidElastic uses machine learning to predict spikes in workload. It also scale your compute instances out before CPU spikes cause service disruption. Interestingly, it also automates bidding and setting up of instances to meet your needs. As a result, it can help you to save and eliminate over-provisioning.

Cloudability

Vendor: Cloudability

Cloudability is a tool primarily focused towards the needs of the finance team. That being said they offer some light automation to resolve some of the recommendations made by their cost analysis tool.

CloudHealth

Vendor: CloudHealth

As with other vendors in the visibility space, CloudHealth a handful of ways to react to the data aggregated by the product. You can automate RI purchases and cycle instances based on CloudHealth’s recommendations.

Cloudwiry

Vendor: Cloudwiry

Cloudwiry provides a library of lambda scripts that you can use to automate AWS cost savings. As is common in this space, those scripts can be scheduled from a calendar type interface.

Densify

Vendor: Cloe

Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Densify identifies the exact provisioning and optimal AWS resource to run your environment in the most cost effective way. Densify then deploys those resources on your behalf – monitoring & adjusting in reaction to any changes in the AWS environment.

DivvyCloud

Vendor: DivvyCloud

DivvyCloud lets organizations set policies to put guardrails around AWS usage to cover security, compliance and cost governance.

CloudRanger

Vendor: Druva

Though CloudRanger was designed as a tool for backup automation, they evolved to include cost optimization in their repertoire. CloudRanger can be used to delete storage that has expired. It can also cycle instances and turn them on and off when they’re not in use. As an extra bonus, CloudRanger can be used for Disaster Recovery – bunkering snapshots into extra regions and then launching them.

FittedCloud

Vendor: FittedCloud

FittedCloud leverages cloud usage data to to identify underutilized resources and optimize them in real-time using machine learning. Users can also set policies to govern FittedCloud’s dynamic resource optimization for extra oversight and peace of mind.

GorillaStack

Vendor: GorillaStack

GorillaStack is a highly flexible and customizable rules engine with cost optimization features. Organizations can use it to define inputs and trigger outputs that result in cloud cost optimization among other things. For example, create a schedule or an SNS topic and then turn off or scale down instances based on the triggering action. (Also see cost optimization use cases)

Out of the box automation configurations include:

• Automated backups and EBS snapshots
• Turning EC2 and RDS instances on and off
• Trigger lambdas from SNS topics
• Multi-region backup for disaster recovery and much more.

All integrated with ChatOps and with granular permissioning so that big teams can be enabled to manage their own infrastructure.

ActOnMagic

Vendor: NTT

ActOnMagic can be used to automate the fixing of resource leakages, to rightsize and to power cycle instances. They have an internal Auto Scaling product whereby a user can set performance thresholds to govern provisioning and optimize performance.

Beam

Vendor: Nutanix

Beam analyzes and reports on underutilized and unused services. It also provides automation that empowers DevOps managers to fix them to realize immediate cost benefits.

ParkMyCloud

Vendor: ParkMyCloud

ParkMyCloud does exactly what it sounds like. Set a schedule to park your cloud instances when they’re not in use. You can also use their SmartParking to set up cycle on and off according to historical usage patterns.

Optima & CMP

Vendor: RightScale

Use RightScale’s products to turn off or remove unused or idle resources. Optimize RI purchases and cycle instances on and off when they’re not in use by scheduling down times.

Skeddly

Vendor: Skeddly

You can use Skeddly to schedule and trigger all sorts of changes inside your cloud. Create and delete backups as well as power cycling EC2 and RDS instances.

Turbonomic

Vendor: Turbonomic

Turbonomic is a platform that uses Machine Learning to investigate an organization’s cloud environment. It generates cost optimization benefits through making scaling and cycling adjustments. Turbonomic also works to maximize Reserved Instance consumption in combination with rightsizing.

Spot Instance Management

EC2 Fleet

Vendor: AWS

Amazon EC2 Fleet allows AWS customers to launch a fleet of instances spanning On-Demand, Reserved and Spot Instances using 1 API call. The user can specify the capacity and instance type with confidence. AWS will then manage the launch, maintenance and monitoring post launch. This automation is perfect for elasticity and scaling.

Spot Fleet

Vendor: AWS

Similar to EC2 Fleet, Spot Fleet will launch Spot Instances and can also launch On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances are launched when the bid price exceeds the market price. It maintains even in a fluid market for as long as the bid price exceeds the market price.

Spot Instance Advisor

Vendor: AWS

Spot Instance Advisor is a feedback tool on cost savings. It gives you recommendations about which types of instances to bid for in which regions for optimal savings but also, and rather usefully, with minimal downtime.

BidElastic

Vendor: BidElastic

BidElastic and BidServer use advanced Machine Learning to define the best achievable price in a fluid Spot Instance market. It then automates the purchasing and maintenance of Spot Instances.

Elastigroup

Vendor: Spotinst

Spotinst was one of the first solutions to automate the bidding, purchasing, and maintenance of Spot Instances while guaranteeing zero downtime. The product redresses capacity and moves to on-demand in anticipation of interruption. In addition to that, it moves your compute to Reserved Instances or On-Demand temporarily until Spot capacity is available again.

If you like to learn how you can adopt cloud cost optimization for your business or kickstart your cloud automation journey, book a session with us today.

Information in this blog are opinions of individual authors and not the views of any organization or employer. Whilst every endeavor has been made to ensure that the information in this product is current, GorillaStack and AWS do not warrant the accuracy or completeness of information in this blog and any person using or relying upon such information does so on the basis that GorillaStack and AWS shall bear no responsibility or liability whatsoever for any errors, faults, defects or omissions.