Cloud Cost Management Platform Requirements Template, Checklist and Gathering Document

This requirements table for cloud cost management platforms provides a comprehensive overview of the key features and functionalities that should be considered when evaluating vendors. The table covers the type of cloud providers supported (like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), the ability to track and forecast costs across multiple services and accounts, the ability to set and monitor budgets, the ability to identify and optimize cost savings opportunities, and the ability to generate detailed cost reports.

Cloud Cost Management Platform Requirements Table

Cloud Cost Management Platform

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Must tie cost insights to developer activity and workflow

Must make it intuitive for developers to predict and understand their costs, and troubleshoot issues with minimal disruptions to their habitual workflow.

Good for Engineering Teams, Pull Request Cost Estimates, Correlate to Deployments, Terraform

Use Case Fit

Integration

Monitoring

Must integrate with DevOps tools

Provides ready-made connectors for pulling and pushing event and cost data from/to the CI/CD pipeline.

Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub, GitLab CI, Bitbucket, Terraform

Integration

Must tie cloud costs to business impact

Provides a suite of tools to make business and engineering decisions based on marginal and average costs and ROI of cloud spend.

Cost per Customer, Cost per Feature, Cost per Event, Marginal Cost Analysis

Monitoring

Optimization

Must meet relevant compliance standards

Must have the necessary compliance certifications to pass a rigorous internal compliance/InfoSec review.

ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, HITRUST, HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, FedRAMP

Compliance

Must support cost data ingestion for the cloud stack

Must monitor and/or optimize cloud spend across the cloud stack.

AWS Support, GCP Support, Azure Support, Snowflake Support, OCI Support

Integration

Use Case Fit

Must connect costs to APM and observability data

Provides ready-made connectors for pulling in various application telemetry data, including logs, metrics, traces, and events, for cloud cost analysis.

New Relic, Splunk, DataDog, Grafana/Prometheus

Integration

Must post notifications to alerting tools

Provides ready-made connectors for pushing to various general or point solutions for alerting, communication, and incident management.

Slack, Microsoft Teams, OpsGenie, PagerDuty

Integration

Must be suitable for financial planning

Must provide the reporting and modeling tools that FP&A needs for forecasting and accounting of cloud spend.

Good for Finance Teams, Cost Forecasting, Forecast Model Updated Daily, Bill Reviews

Use Case Fit

Optimization

Monitoring

Must provide granular insight into Kubernetes-related spend

Must provide the same level of support for Kubernetes and container spend insights as other native cloud services.

Basic Kubernetes Support, Advanced Kubernetes Support, On-prem Kubernetes Support, Automated Container Cost Allocation

Integration

Use Case Fit

Monitoring

Must provide flexible deployment options

Provides a suitable and seamless path to integration and a short time to start getting value out of the tool.

Available on AWS Marketplace, Available on Azure Marketplace, Available on Google Cloud Marketplace, Works without CUR data, Self-serve Installation

Integration

Must have affordable pricing

Must be competitively priced for the expected level of adoption of the tool and the projected growth in cloud spend.

Cheap Kubernetes Metric Retention, Cheap Cost History Retention, Low Cloud Tax, Enterprise Discounts

Pricing

Must provide comprehensive monitoring of cloud spend

Monitors all cloud platform spend with near-limitless possibilities for slicing and dicing the data to troubleshoot cost issues.

Enterprise Discounts, Effective Without Tagging, Automated Container Cost Allocation, Anomaly Detection, API Drill-down, Non-cost Tag Drill-down, Rapid Cost Report Ingestion, Real-time Cost Estimates

Monitoring

Pricing

Must provide comprehensive tools for cost allocation

Provides ways to automate chargeback and allocation of costs to business units/groups and monitor compliance with budgets.

Business Groups, Effective Without Tagging, Automated Container Cost Allocation, Chargeback Policies and Allocation, Budgets

Monitoring

Use Case Fit

Must optimize compute costs

Detects waste and leverages machine learning technology to map, predict, and manage cloud compute costs efficiently across instances and discount plans.

True Cost, Idle Resource Detection, Committed Use Discount Management, Compute Rightsizing Recommendations, Integrated Spot Management

Optimization

Must optimize storage costs

Detects waste and leverages machine learning technology to map, predict, and manage cloud storage costs efficiently across disks, volumes, buckets, etc.

Volume and Snapshot Management, Storage Rightsizing Recommendations

Optimization

Must access cloud platform data securely

Provides a safe and secure way to reliably pull cloud cost information and container telemetry.

Limited IAM Role Access, Agentless

Compliance

Must meet enterprise auth and access control standards

Provides the standard enterprise features for limiting access to the application to specific groups of users and more secure authentication methods.

Enterprise SSO/SAML, Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

Compliance

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