What type of cloud service type would a finance and expense tracking solution typically be in?

Cloud computing offers nearly limitless capacity on-demand, but left unmanaged, that flexibility can lead to surprisingly high monthly cloud bills.

To be fair, rising cloud costs aren't always a bad thing; they could be a signal of growth. For example, you’ll incur higher costs as you gain more customers. Your costs of goods sold (COGS) may also increase.

These scenarios are often a good thing unless your margins on COGS are thinning out. In this case, it may be worth rethinking your cloud financial management strategy. Cloud financial management is the continuous process of identifying, analyzing, monitoring, and optimizing cloud costs.

Cloud financial management can help you:

• Organize and track your cloud resource usage and related costs
• Consolidate billing and access permissions for better control
• Plan better with data-backed cloud budgets and cost forecasts
• Lower costs by optimizing resources and taking advantage of discounting programs like AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.

We’ve covered cloud financial management in greater detail here. Yet, attempting to manually implement cloud financial management best practices can be a major challenge due to the cloud's flexibility and vastness. You can instead leverage these robust services and tools to minimize your cloud bill, workload, and avoidable errors.

5 Top Cloud Financial Management Software Solutions to Consider Immediately

1. CloudZero - Cloud cost intelligence for AWS, Kubernetes, and Snowflake

Unlike most traditional cloud cost management tools, CloudZero correlates cloud cost metrics with the people, products, and processes that generate them.

This not only supports precise chargebacks and showbacks, but also provides an accurate basis for forecasting and allocating costs. CloudZero gives you granular insights into your costs regardless of whether you're running workloads on AWS, Kubernetes, or Snowflake. You’ll get:

• Cost per feature - View how much you spend to build and support a specific feature so you can price it profitably.
• Cost per dev team - See where specific teams spend their resources and why, so you can optimize their workflows.
• Cost per deployment - Determine how much it costs to launch a particular feature, see how that affects your overall costs, and monitor progress so you can prevent overspending.
• Cost per project - View each engineering project’s costs from beginning to end. This can help you give accurate customer quotes, set adequate budgets, and optimize costs without compromising quality.

• Cost per customer - Know how much it costs to support each customer so you can improve your margins.
• Cost per tenant - Tell precisely how much it takes to support each individual tenant in a shared/multi-tenant environment.

If you use AWS Savings Plans, Spot Instances, and Reserved Instances, CloudZero’s discount optimization dashboard makes it easy to monitor how you're utilizing your discounts to maximize their effectiveness.

CloudZero’s autonomous AWS Savings Plan, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances optimization in a single pane of glass.

CloudZero Budgets help you track cloud resource usage, spot consumption patterns, and detect cost anomalies before they become a costly budget overrun.

Ultimately, CloudZero starts you off with a thorough analysis of your cloud financial standing. You’ll then get a Cost Intelligence Analyst to review your spending and recommend expert ways to optimize your cloud spend. Schedule a demo here to get started.

2. Xosphere - Cloud financial management solution for Spot Instance Optimization

The Xosphere Instance Orchestrator automatically replaces On-Demand Instances with Spot Instances as soon as the latter are available for a reasonable price. Once Spot Instance capacity decreases or becomes uneconomical, Xosphere intelligently swaps your current Spot Instances with On-Demand Instances.

See, whenever AWS wants Spot capacity back, you get a two-minute notice to move workloads to On-Demand or new Spot Instances. By automating this switching, Xosphere protects your workload from outages, performance degradation, and errors. You can then run more workloads on the most affordable AWS instances for longer, even if those workloads are less fault-tolerant.

Xosphere also supports apps written in any language, running on any platform, including containers (from Kubernetes and EKS to Mesos, ECS, and Rancher). You can also utilize Xosphere for your favorite data stores, including MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and Redis.

3. ProsperOps - Autonomous AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans optimization solution

AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances can save customers over 72% off On-Demand pricing. But the majority of customers save less than 20%. With ProsperOps' autonomous savings management platform, your organization can reduce its commitment risk while maximizing discounts and reservation utilization in AWS.

ProsperOps programmatically executes Reserved Instance optimization to help take advantage of AWS discount instruments. It continuously monitors your reservations and usage and autonomously maintains an optimal Reserved Instances and Savings Plans portfolio in your environment.

ProsperOps is also an approved CloudZero partner. In addition, it is a founding member of the FinOps Foundation, a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing, a FinOps Certified Platform, and an AWS Advanced Technology Partner.

4. Kubecost - Dedicated Kubernetes cost management platform

Kubecost is a thorough, real-time cost monitoring and governance platform for Kubernetes. This is an excellent choice for companies that run most or all their workloads on Kubernetes.

With Kubecost, you can view costs across in-cluster, shared, and external cloud services, see Kubernetes costs as they trend, and get cost optimization recommendations. Kubecost also breaks down Kubernetes costs by several Kubernetes concepts, such as service, deployment, namespace, and label. Meaning, you can use it to inform your cost forecasting and allocation needs.

Also, the platform supports deployment in AWS (EKS), on-premises, Azure (AKS), Air Gapped, and Google Cloud (GKE) environments.

Looking to find the right Kubernetes cost management tool? See these 10 top Kubecost alternatives.

5. AWS Cloud Financial Management suite

The AWS Cloud Financial Management suite is a collection of tools, services, and resources for managing costs in the AWS public cloud.

They are typically free; complimentary to AWS subscriptions. AWS cloud cost management tools provide decent analytics and reporting, especially for companies that do not have complex cloud bills or are just getting started with cloud financial management software solutions.

The tools include:

• AWS Cost Explorer - Track the usage and costs associated with multiple AWS services over time and in one place.
• AWS Cost and Usage Report - Access detailed information about AWS pricing, cost categories, discounts, services, etc.
• AWS Budgets - Plan your AWS resource consumption and costs and improve forecasting

The other tools here include AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS Cost Categories.

See more of the best cloud cost optimization tools for AWS in this in-depth guide.

Get The Cost Intelligence You Need To Make Informed Decisions

Manual, clunky, and inexact tools dominate the market. CloudZero isn’t just another cost tool you need to manage.

Instead, you'll be able to identify who, what, and why your cloud costs are changing, allocate 100% of your spend in hours, and pinpoint exactly where to optimize costs without sacrificing growth.