Cloud Cost Management Tools from AWS, Azure and GCP

A comprehensive guide to the cost management tools provided by the major cloud platforms.

As cloud adoption accelerates, managing cloud costs has become a critical concern for businesses. With global cloud spending projected to reach $630.3 billion in 2024 (Statista) organisations are under increasing pressure to optimise their cloud usage and prevent wasted resources. In fact, it’s estimated that up to 30% of cloud spend is wasted due to inefficient management and under-utilisation of resources.

Cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer a variety of native tools to help businesses manage, track, and optimise their cloud costs. However, navigating these tools and understanding their full potential can be challenging. In this article, we’ll explore the cost management solutions provided by AWS, Azure, and GCP, comparing their features and highlighting which tools might be the best fit for your business. Whether you’re focused on cost forecasting, usage monitoring, or budget alerts, this guide will help you streamline cloud cost management and avoid unnecessary expenses.

👉 Discover how a custom solution can streamline your cloud cost management and deliver up to 40% savings here.

Cloud providers offer native tools specifically designed for monitoring and managing cloud costs. These tools are typically integrated into the cloud provider’s platform, offering seamless access to cost data and analysis.

Table of Contents

1. AWS Cloud Cost Optimisation Tools
2. Azure Cloud Cost Optimisation Tools
3. Google Cloud Cost Management Tools
4. Why Built-in Cloud Tools Can’t Do It All
5. How to Get Cloud Cost Management Right from the Start

AWS Cloud Cost Optimisation Tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a comprehensive set of built-in tools under the AWS Cloud Financial Management umbrella. These tools help businesses manage, track, and optimise their cloud costs by organising costs, generating reports, controlling budgets, and rightsizing resources. Below is a breakdown of the cost management tools, organised according to AWS’s categorisation:

1. Organise

Construct your cost allocation strategy that aligns with your business logic

• AWS Billing Conductor: Helps customise billing for different business units and provides greater control over cost allocations.
• AWS Cost Allocation Tags: Enables tagging of resources to allocate costs based on departments, projects, or teams, making cost tracking easier.
• AWS Cost Categories: Organise your costs by creating custom categories that align with your business structure.

2. Report

Raise awareness and accountability of your cloud spend with detailed, allocable cost data

• AWS Cost Explorer: Visualise and analyse your AWS spending over time with interactive dashboards.
• AWS Cost and Usage Report: Delivers detailed information about your AWS cost and usage in CSV format.
• AWS Application Cost Profiler: Allows you to break down costs by application for more granular visibility into usage. (being depreciated)

3. Access

Track billing information across the organisation in a consolidated view

• AWS Consolidated Billing: Manage multiple AWS accounts under one bill to simplify financial management.
• AWS Purchase Order Management: Track, manage, and reconcile your AWS purchase orders.
• AWS Credits: Apply AWS credits to reduce your overall bill.

4. Control

Establish effective governance mechanisms with the right guardrails in place

• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Automatically detects unexpected spikes in AWS spending and alerts you to unusual activity.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): Helps manage access to AWS services securely to prevent unnecessary cost exposure.
• AWS Organizations: Create and manage groups of AWS accounts to apply governance, policies, and security controls across multiple environments.
• AWS Control Tower: Set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices.
• AWS Service Catalog: Create and manage catalogues of approved products to avoid uncontrolled spending.

5. Forecast

Estimate your resource utilisation and spend with forecast dashboards you create

• AWS Cost Explorer (Self-Service): Provides forecasting capabilities to estimate future AWS spending based on historical data.
• AWS Budgets (Event-Driven): Allow you to set custom thresholds for your AWS budgets and trigger alerts when spending reaches specified limits.

6. Budget

Keep your spend in check with custom budget thresholds and auto alert notifications

• AWS Budgets: Create custom budgets to monitor costs and receive alerts when approaching limits.
• AWS Budget Actions: Automatically take actions, like stopping resources, when budgets exceed thresholds.
• AWS Service Catalog: Provides pre-approved products with cost limitations for team usage.

7. Purchase

Leverage free trials and programmatic discounts based on your workload patterns

• AWS Free Tier: Provides 12 months of free usage for new customers and includes free tier access to popular AWS services like EC2 and S3.
• AWS Reserved Instances: Offers significant savings on EC2 usage when committing to one- or three-year terms.
• AWS Savings Plans: Flexible pricing model offering lower prices based on committed usage over one or three years.
• AWS Spot Instances: Allows you to purchase unused capacity at up to 90% discounts for fault-tolerant workloads.
• Amazon DynamoDB On-Demand: Scalable on-demand pricing that adjusts based on usage.

8. Elasticity

Scale and schedule your services based on your expected utilisation pattern

• AWS Instance Scheduler: Automate instance start and stop times to reduce idle hours.
• Amazon Redshift Pause and Resume: Pause and resume Redshift clusters when not in use to save on costs.
• EC2 Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts your EC2 instance capacity to maintain performance while controlling costs.
• AWS Trusted Advisor: Provides automated recommendations for optimising costs, improving security, and increasing performance.

9. Rightsize

Align your service allocation size to your actual workload demand

• AWS Cost Explorer Right Sizing Recommendations: Offers rightsizing recommendations for EC2 instances to optimise utilisation and cost.
• AWS Compute Optimizer: Provides recommendations for EC2 instances based on historical data to optimise performance and costs.
• Amazon Redshift Resize: Scale your Redshift clusters up or down based on workload requirements.
• Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering: Automatically moves data between access tiers to reduce storage costs.

10. Inspect

Stay up-to-date with your resource deployment and cost optimisation opportunities

• AWS Cost Explorer: Offers comprehensive cost and usage reports, enabling deeper insights into where optimisation opportunities exist.

AWS provides a wide array of cost management tools that cater to a variety of needs, from forecasting and budgeting to scaling and rightsizing. These tools are critical for businesses looking to gain visibility into their AWS spend and optimise their cloud infrastructure for cost savings.

Azure Cloud Cost Optimisation Tools

Microsoft Azure provides a wide range of tools to help businesses manage and optimise their cloud costs, organised into several categories: understanding costs, optimising workloads, and controlling costs. These tools offer deep insights into cloud spending, help you take advantage of savings opportunities, and enable cost-efficient scaling. Below is a breakdown of Azure’s cost management tools, following the categorisation on Azure’s cost optimisation page.

1. Understand and Forecast Your Costs

These tools provide insights into your cloud usage, helping you track, monitor, and estimate costs for more accurate forecasting:

• Microsoft Cost Management: Allows you to monitor and analyse your Azure bill, providing real-time insights into costs and usage across your organisation.
• Azure Pricing Calculator: Helps you estimate the costs of your Azure projects by providing detailed price estimates for services before deployment.
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator: Helps calculate the total cost of moving your workloads to Azure by comparing the costs of your current on-premises setup with Azure services.

2. Cost Optimise Your Workloads

Azure offers several tools to help reduce your cloud costs by optimising your workloads based on best practices and recommendations:

• Azure Advisor: Provides personalised best practice recommendations to optimise your Azure resources, including suggestions on shutting down unused resources or resizing underutilised ones to reduce costs.
• Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework: Offers design documentation and best practices to optimise your workload architecture for cost-efficiency.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit: Saves costs when migrating your Windows Server or SQL Server workloads to Azure by using your existing licenses to reduce cloud spend (up to 76% savings).
• Azure Reservations: Provides up to 72% savings when you prepay for one- or three-year terms on virtual machines (VMs) and other services.
• Azure Spot Virtual Machines: Helps you save up to 90% on VMs by utilising unused Azure capacity, ideal for fault-tolerant or flexible workloads.
• Azure Savings Plan for Compute: Save up to 65% on compute resources by committing to a fixed hourly amount for one or three years.
• Azure Dev/Test Pricing: Provides special pricing for development and test environments, helping to reduce costs while developing new applications.

3. Control Your Costs

Governance and cost control mechanisms are key to ensuring that cloud spending is managed and controlled across your organisation. These tools help implement cost-saving best practices:

• Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure: Provides guidelines and best practices for managing cloud adoption, including governance and cost management strategies.
• Azure Policy: Helps you enforce organisational standards and cost controls by implementing policies that align with your cost-saving goals.
• Azure Budgets and Alerts: Create and manage budgets for Azure services, set thresholds, and receive alerts when spending approaches or exceeds budgeted amounts.

Azure’s wide range of cost management and optimisation tools ensures that businesses can effectively track, manage, and reduce their cloud expenses. By leveraging these tools and adopting best practices, companies can not only control their costs but also make their cloud infrastructure more efficient and scalable.

Google Cloud Cost Management Tools

Google Cloud provides a comprehensive set of cost management tools that help businesses monitor, control, and optimise their cloud costs. These tools are designed to give you visibility into your cloud spending, enable financial governance, and provide recommendations to help reduce costs and improve efficiency. Below is a breakdown of the key Google Cloud cost management tools, organised into categories similar to other cloud providers.

1. Gain Visibility into Your Costs

Google Cloud offers tools that help you understand your current spending patterns and forecast future costs. These tools provide real-time insights and allow for the organisation of resources to drive cost accountability across teams.

• Google Cloud Console Reports and Dashboards: Offers at-a-glance views of current cost trends and forecasts, with customisable dashboards through Looker Studio.
• Google Cloud Pricing Calculator: Helps estimate the costs of your next Google Cloud project by providing detailed price estimates for services.
• Billing Export to BigQuery: Automatically export detailed usage, cost, and pricing data to BigQuery for further analysis.
• Resource Hierarchy and Access Controls: Organise resources into organisations, folders, and projects with labels for granular cost allocation and tracking.
• Billing APIs: Programmatically access and manage your billing accounts and resources using Google Cloud’s Billing APIs.

2. Optimise Your Spending and Savings

Google Cloud offers tools that provide intelligent recommendations for cost optimisation. These recommendations help businesses minimise cloud expenses by adjusting resources and workloads based on actual usage patterns.

• Intelligent Cost Recommendations: Provides insights into optimising your resource usage, including rightsizing instances and removing unused resources for immediate savings.
• Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts (CUDs): Offers discounts of up to 57% when you commit to long-term usage of specific services.
• Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs): Automatically applied discounts for instances that run continuously throughout the month, with savings of up to 30%.
• Google Cloud Spot VMs: Provides significant savings (up to 91%) by using Google’s spare compute capacity, ideal for fault-tolerant workloads.
• Quotas and Limits: Set quotas to proactively control your spending and prevent unforeseen cost spikes.

3. Control Your Cloud Costs

Google Cloud provides governance tools that help organisations implement financial controls, allowing for effective cost management. These tools ensure that only authorised personnel can spend or access cost-related data.

• Budgets and Alerts: Create and manage budgets to monitor cloud spending, set thresholds, and receive alerts via email or Pub/Sub when costs exceed defined limits.
• Automated Budget Actions: Programmatically configure actions when budgets are exceeded, such as throttling resources to prevent further spending.
• Billing Access Control: Use granular permissions to enforce organisational policies, ensuring that only authorised users can spend and view billing information.

Why Built-in Cloud Tools Can’t Do It All

While built-in cloud cost management tools offer powerful features and integrate directly with cloud platforms, they come with significant challenges. The complexity of setting up these tools, the need for skilled specialists, and the ongoing maintenance requirements make them difficult for many organisations to manage effectively. Here are some of the key limitations:

• Requires skilled specialists: These tools are only as effective as the people who configure and manage them. Without dedicated expertise, businesses can struggle to get the most out of these tools.
• Complex setup: The initial setup for cloud cost management tools is intricate and time-consuming. Misconfigurations during setup can result in inaccurate cost visibility or missed optimisation opportunities.
• Maintenance challenges: Managing and maintaining these tools requires continuous oversight. As cloud environments evolve, the tools need to be adjusted and fine-tuned to ensure they provide the necessary insights.
• Risk of misconfiguration: If not set up correctly, these tools can leave gaps in cost visibility, leading to inefficiencies and missed cost-saving opportunities.

While built-in tools have potential, they often fall short when it comes to simplifying cloud cost management without the right expertise. This is where partnering with a dedicated cost optimisation provider can make a significant difference.

How to Get Cloud Cost Management Right from the Start

While the built-in cost management tools provided by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are powerful, they often require skilled specialists to set up and maintain effectively. Without the correct configuration from the start, your organisation may lack the critical visibility needed to fully understand and optimise cloud spending.

One of the common challenges businesses face is that without a dedicated person or team focused on cloud costs, accountability often slips through the cracks. Teams are reluctant to take ownership of costs, which can lead to overspending, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities for optimisation.

Working with a specialist will help you in configuring and managing cloud cost optimisation using the cloud-native tools provided by your existing cloud provider. Our team ensures that your cost monitoring is set up correctly from the start, giving you the full visibility and control needed to manage your cloud spend effectively. We work directly within your cloud environment, using the tools you’re already paying for, without the need for third-party solutions or additional licensing costs.

Ready to take control of your cloud costs? Learn more about how we can help by visiting our Cloud Cost Optimisation page and discover how we set you up for long-term success with significant savings.

👉 Learn more about how a tailored solution can reduce your cloud costs by up to 40% here.