Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we live in a perfect world. In that world, you could check your company’s cloud bills and financial reports and find cleanly organized categories of spending that help you instantly understand where your money is going and why. Your engineers would meticulously label every spend item with useful metadata tags so you can clearly see which costs have increased and which are most affecting your bottom line.

You work hard to deliver a great product to your target market. Yet, when it’s time to price your worth, it’s challenging to set a fair pricing strategy, model, or amount. This anxiety is understandable. If you charge too much, you could lose potential and existing customers. If you are a start-up, this bad first impression can be detrimental to your growth. For larger businesses, some customers may feel you are losing touch and switch to newer or veteran competitors.

In the beginning of cloud computing, before the earliest cost tools came along to give companies a glimpse into their spending, most businesses found it hard to determine where their cloud budget was going. The money disappeared into the black hole of the cloud service provider, and in exchange, the business received cloud services. Achieving any sort of granularity beyond that was next to impossible.

Apptio announced on May 31, 2019, that it had acquired Cloudability, hoping to strengthen its mission through its new product. Cloudability is a multi-cloud financial management platform for enterprises looking for a more unified way to view, understand, and act on cloud cost insight. Cloudability lets enterprises analyze cloud costs across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Apptio Cloudability provides FinOps capabilities as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The job of a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professional is to oversee the building of financial models, track budgets, and partner with stakeholders across their organization to make better decisions. For FP&A professionals in charge of partnering with engineering and product organizations, this means understanding how investments in innovation, from software purchases to headcount, are driving business outcomes. Like any team in an organization, this comes with its own unique set of challenges.

Virtualization technology provider VMware acquired CloudHealth in August 2018. VMware hoped the new addition would enable more organizations to manage services on other cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and their private data centers. So, what does CloudHealth do and how much does it cost? Is it a good all-in-one platform for cloud management? This guide explores CloudHealth pricing, features, and possible alternatives to help you decide if the solution is right for you (or if there is a better option).

At CloudZero, we’re confident that we can organize cloud spend better than anyone else out there. For years, we’ve helped companies to efficiently organize spend, while overcoming traditional hurdles to visibility, like shared cost, incomplete tagging, and Kubernetes. We’ve helped customers who have struggled to attribute spend to do so in a matter of days — without saddling engineering teams with new projects or embarking on a resource tagging expedition with no end in sight.

In the beginning, companies and cloud cost management vendors focused on reducing the absolute cost of the cloud. That would be the equivalent of solely focusing on the total cost of a sales organization versus considering how much new revenue they were booking, or the productivity of the sales team or the cost of customer acquisition. As cloud spend followed its rapid growth trajectory, curbing it most often relied on discounts.

One of the best features of the public cloud is that it utilizes a model that enables multiple organizations to share cloud resources. This approach leverages economies of scale, ensuring each tenant sharing those resources receives a lighter bill than if they utilized a private cloud dedicated to just them. Likewise, multi-tenancy in cloud computing is cloud architecture that enables multiple organizations/customers/users to share resources like virtual machines, storage, and server components.

When you’re already strapped for time and bogged down by cloud bills that seem higher than they should be, you may not be inclined to devote months to researching the best cloud cost tools. And unless you’ve used a cost tool before, you may have no idea where to start. What happens if you use multiple cloud providers? Is one payment scheme better than another? And what do you do if your company hasn’t stayed on top of tagging?