What software tracks and reduces AWS or Azure spending?

There's a whole category of software dedicated to tracking and reducing AWS and Azure spending. These are generally referred to as **Cloud Cost Management (CCM)** or **Cloud Financial Management (CFM)** tools.

Here's a breakdown of the types of software and popular examples for both AWS and Azure:

## Key Features of Cloud Cost Management Software:

Before diving into specific tools, it's helpful to understand what these solutions typically offer:

* **Visibility and Reporting:** Providing detailed dashboards and reports on spending across accounts, services, teams, and projects.

* **Cost Allocation and Tagging:** Enabling accurate attribution of costs to specific teams, applications, or business units through intelligent tagging strategies.

* **Anomaly Detection:** Identifying unexpected spikes in spending and alerting you to potential issues.

* **Optimization Recommendations:** Suggesting ways to reduce costs, such as rightsizing instances, identifying idle resources, and leveraging reserved instances or savings plans.

* **Budgeting and Forecasting:** Setting budgets, tracking progress against them, and forecasting future spending.

* **Automation:** Automating tasks like shutting down non-production environments during off-hours or scaling resources based on demand.

* **Showback/Chargeback:** Providing clear visibility of costs to stakeholders and enabling chargeback to specific departments.

* **Rightsizing:** Analyzing resource utilization and recommending more appropriate instance types or sizes.

* **Identifying Idle/Underutilized Resources:** Spotting resources that are running but not being used effectively.

* **Commitment Management:** Helping you make the most of Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans for significant discounts.

## Software Categories and Popular Tools:

You can broadly categorize these tools into:

1. **Cloud Provider Native Tools:** Built and offered by AWS and Azure themselves.

2. **Third-Party CCM Tools:** Specialized software developed by independent companies.

---

### For AWS:

**1. Cloud Provider Native Tools (AWS):**

* **AWS Cost Explorer:** This is the primary free tool from AWS for visualizing, understanding, and managing your AWS costs and usage. It allows you to explore your cost data, filter by service, linked account, tag, and more.

* **AWS Budgets:** Allows you to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.

* **AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR):** Provides the most granular and comprehensive data about your AWS costs and usage. You can export this data to S3 for analysis.

* **AWS Trusted Advisor:** Offers recommendations for cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. The cost optimization checks are particularly relevant here.

**2. Third-Party CCM Tools (AWS):**

These tools often offer more advanced features, deeper analytics, and multi-cloud capabilities.

* **CloudHealth by VMware:** A very popular and comprehensive platform for cloud financial management, governance, and optimization across AWS, Azure, GCP, and others.

* **Apptio Cloudability:** Another leading CCM platform that offers robust cost visibility, optimization recommendations, and budgeting features.

* **Densify:** Focuses on AI-driven optimization, identifying opportunities for rightsizing, cloud instance selection, and waste reduction.

* **Spot by NetApp (formerly Spot.io):** While known for its workload automation and spot instance management, it also offers cost optimization features.

* **Harness Cloud Cost Management:** Part of the broader Harness platform, this module provides visibility, optimization, and governance for cloud spend.

* **Flexera One (formerly RightScale):** Offers a suite of cloud management capabilities including cost optimization and governance.

* **RISE with AWS (from Managed Service Providers):** Some AWS Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer their own cost optimization tools and services as part of their offering.

---

### For Azure:

**1. Cloud Provider Native Tools (Azure):**

* **Azure Cost Management + Billing:** This is Azure's integrated solution for managing and optimizing your cloud spend. It provides detailed cost analysis, budgeting, and recommendations.

* **Azure Advisor:** Similar to AWS Trusted Advisor, it provides personalized recommendations for improving the performance, security, and cost-effectiveness of your Azure deployments. The cost recommendations are a key feature.

* **Azure Budgets:** Allows you to set budgets to monitor and control your Azure spending.

* **Azure Export Data (for Billing):** Provides detailed cost and usage data that you can export for further analysis.

**2. Third-Party CCM Tools (Azure):**

Many of the third-party tools that support AWS also offer strong support for Azure, often with multi-cloud capabilities.

* **CloudHealth by VMware:** (Same as for AWS)

* **Apptio Cloudability:** (Same as for AWS)

* **Densify:** (Same as for AWS)

* **Flexera One:** (Same as for AWS)

* **Harness Cloud Cost Management:** (Same as for AWS)

* **Cloudamize:** Offers cloud assessment and cost optimization services.

* **ParkMyCloud by 1E:** Focuses on identifying and eliminating wasted cloud spend, particularly through automation of resource shutdown.

* **CloudScale360:** Provides a platform for cloud cost optimization and financial governance.

---

## Choosing the Right Software:

When selecting a tool, consider:

* **Your Cloud Footprint:** Are you primarily on AWS, Azure, or multi-cloud?

* **Budget:** Native tools are free, but third-party tools have varying pricing models.

* **Required Features:** What specific problems are you trying to solve (e.g., just visibility, or also complex optimization and automation)?

* **Ease of Use:** How intuitive is the interface for your team?

* **Integration:** Does it integrate with your existing monitoring or IT management tools?

* **Support:** What level of support do you need?

For most organizations, starting with the **native cloud provider tools (AWS Cost Explorer/Budgets and Azure Cost Management + Billing/Advisor)** is a good first step. As your cloud spend grows and your needs become more sophisticated, you can then explore third-party solutions.