What software tracks and reduces AWS or Azure spending?

Both AWS and Azure provide their own native tools for tracking and reducing spending, and there's also a robust ecosystem of third-party solutions that offer more advanced features, multi-cloud capabilities, and automation.

Here's a breakdown:

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## Native Cloud Provider Tools

These are built into the respective cloud platforms and are often the first line of defense for cost management.

### For AWS Spending:

**Tracking:**

1. **AWS Cost Explorer:** Provides a visual interface to analyze your costs and usage over time. You can filter by service, region, tags, and more. It also offers forecasting.

2. **AWS Budgets:** Allows you to set custom budgets (cost, usage, or reservation utilization) and receive alerts when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.

3. **AWS Billing Dashboard:** A high-level overview of your current and past spending, payment history, and billing preferences.

4. **AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR):** The most comprehensive dataset of your AWS costs and usage. It's a highly granular report that can be delivered to an S3 bucket and analyzed with tools like Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, or third-party solutions.

**Reducing/Optimizing:**

1. **AWS Compute Optimizer:** Recommends optimal AWS resources for your workloads to reduce costs and improve performance. It covers EC2 instances, EBS volumes, Lambda functions, and Fargate.

2. **AWS Trusted Advisor (Cost Optimization checks):** Provides recommendations for reducing costs by identifying idle resources, underutilized instances, and opportunities for Reserved Instances or Savings Plans.

3. **Savings Plans & Reserved Instances:** While not software, these are pricing models that offer significant discounts in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (Savings Plans) or specific instance types (Reserved Instances). Managing them effectively is key to cost reduction.

4. **AWS Organizations:** For consolidated billing across multiple AWS accounts, making it easier to track and manage costs centrally.

### For Azure Spending:

**Tracking:**

1. **Azure Cost Management + Billing:** This is the primary portal for all things cost-related in Azure. It allows you to:

* Analyze costs with rich visualizations and filters (by resource group, tag, service, etc.).

* Set budgets and receive alerts.

* Export cost data for further analysis.

* View invoices and payment history.

2. **Azure Advisor (Cost recommendations):** Provides personalized recommendations to optimize your Azure spending by identifying idle resources, rightsizing opportunities, and potential savings from Azure Reservations.

**Reducing/Optimizing:**

1. **Azure Advisor (Cost recommendations):** As mentioned above, it's a key tool for identifying cost-saving opportunities.

2. **Azure Reservations:** Similar to AWS Reserved Instances, these offer significant discounts (up to 72%) on compute resources (VMs, SQL Database, Cosmos DB, etc.) when you commit to a one-year or three-year term.

3. **Azure Hybrid Benefit:** Allows you to use your existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance on Azure, saving you money on virtual machines and SQL Database.

4. **Azure Policy:** Can be used to enforce cost-saving rules, such as preventing the deployment of expensive VM sizes or ensuring all resources are tagged for cost allocation.

5. **Management Groups:** Help organize subscriptions into containers for unified governance and cost management.

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## Third-Party Cloud Cost Management & FinOps Platforms

These solutions often provide a unified view across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) and offer more advanced features, automation, and deeper insights. They are often referred to as Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) or FinOps platforms.

**Common Features:**

* **Multi-Cloud Visibility:** A single dashboard to see spending across all your cloud providers.

* **Advanced Reporting & Dashboards:** More customizable and granular reporting than native tools.

* **Anomaly Detection:** Uses AI/ML to detect unusual spending patterns and alert you.

* **Rightsizing Recommendations:** More sophisticated analysis for optimizing instance types, storage, and other resources.

* **Automated Savings Plan/Reserved Instance Management:** Tools that automatically buy, sell, or exchange commitments to maximize savings.

* **Showback/Chargeback:** Tools to accurately allocate costs back to specific teams, departments, or projects.

* **Budgeting & Forecasting:** More robust forecasting models and budget management.

* **Governance & Policy Enforcement:** Tools to define and enforce cost-related policies across your cloud environment.

* **Integration:** Connects with ITSM, CMDB, and other enterprise systems.

**Popular Third-Party Software:**

1. **CloudHealth by VMware:** A leading platform offering comprehensive cost management, optimization, security, and governance across multi-cloud environments.

2. **Flexera One (formerly RightScale):** Provides cloud cost optimization, governance, and automation across hybrid and multi-cloud.

3. **Apptio Cloudability:** Focuses on financial management for the cloud, offering detailed cost analysis, optimization, and forecasting.

4. **Spot by NetApp (formerly Spotinst):** Specializes in automating cloud infrastructure to reduce costs, particularly by leveraging spot instances and optimizing Reserved Instances/Savings Plans.

5. **Densify:** Focuses on AI-powered cloud and container resource optimization, providing precise recommendations for rightsizing.

6. **Harness (formerly OpsMx):** While known for CI/CD, it also offers robust cloud cost management capabilities, especially for Kubernetes.

7. **ProsperOps:** Specializes in automated, autonomous optimization of AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.

8. **Kion (formerly cloudtamer.io):** Offers cloud governance, financial management, and automation for multi-cloud environments.

9. **Cast.ai:** Specifically designed for Kubernetes cost optimization, helping to reduce cloud spend on containerized workloads.

10. **Anodot:** While broader in scope, its AI-driven anomaly detection can be applied to cloud spending to quickly identify unexpected cost spikes.

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**Which one to choose?**

* **Start with Native Tools:** For smaller organizations or those just beginning their cloud journey, the native AWS and Azure tools are free and provide a good foundation for tracking and basic optimization.

* **Consider Third-Party for Advanced Needs:** If you have a multi-cloud environment, complex cost allocation needs, require deeper automation, or need more sophisticated optimization recommendations, a third-party FinOps platform will likely be a better fit. They often pay for themselves through the savings they generate.