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Looking for recommendations on DevOps cost reduction tools that actually work
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Our cloud bills are getting out of control and management is breathing down our necks about cost reduction. We're using AWS primarily with some Azure services mixed in.
I've tried a few DevOps cost reduction tools but honestly most of them just give you pretty graphs without actually helping you save money. We need something that can identify real waste and suggest actionable changes.
Has anyone found DevOps cost reduction tools that actually helped them cut their cloud spending significantly? I'm talking about tools that go beyond just showing you what you're spending and actually help you optimize.
I've been using CloudHealth for AWS cost management and it's been pretty good for identifying waste. The thing is, most DevOps cost reduction tools need proper tagging to work effectively. We spent a month getting our tagging strategy right across all resources, and that made the tools actually useful.
Also check out Kubecost for Kubernetes cost optimization. It gives you per-namespace, per-team breakdowns which helped us have better conversations with engineering teams about their resource usage.
We had good results with AWS Cost Explorer's recommendations engine. It's not perfect but it does surface some obvious savings opportunities. The key is to actually implement the suggestions though - we saved about 15% just by rightsizing instances that were way overprovisioned.
For Azure, Azure Cost Management has gotten much better recently. Their savings recommendations are actually actionable now.
Honestly the best DevOps cost reduction tool we found was... spreadsheets. Not joking. We built a simple dashboard that pulls data from cloud APIs and shows teams their spending in real time. When developers can see the cost impact of their decisions immediately, behavior changes.
We also implemented spot instances for non-production workloads and saved a ton. The trick is having good automation to handle spot termination gracefully.
Forgot to mention - we started using Spot by NetApp (formerly Spotinst) for AWS spot instance management. Their predictive algorithms for spot instance availability and automated fallback to on-demand when spots get terminated have saved us about 60% on our compute costs. Definitely worth checking out if you're serious about DevOps cost reduction.
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