CloudKeeper

A great number of businesses today have moved over to cloud services to fuel expansion and improve flexibility. Availing of cloud services opens up several avenues for a company and helps it scale to greater heights. It also helps improve operational efficiency and interdepartmental coordination while ensuring data security. Hence, several SaaS-based businesses are shifting to cloud services to meet their organization’s growing needs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the biggest providers of on-demand cloud services to businesses today. Organizations of all sizes use AWS to improve scalability and take their business to greater heights. Despite its advantages, reducing the expenditure on AWS Cloud is a challenge for many organizations. This is because firms need to purchase packages or bundles according to the services they avail of.

Most businesses experience seasonality of demand and varying revenues. Hence, overcommitting on an AWS savings plan leads to unused server capacity. On the other hand, under-committing leads to higher expenditure for on-demand instances during peak business periods. Additionally, being in a phase of rapid growth, the long-term needs of such firms remain uncertain and dynamic. 

Due to the above issues, a large section of companies availing AWS cannot curb their spending and minimize wastage. Furthermore, AWS’s many options and plans, like reservations, instances, storage, etc., make it even more complicated to compute costs. Hence, a significant number of firms struggle to optimize their AWS costs.

Businesses that adopted AWS early on also understand that AWS cost-optimization isn’t a one-time activity and needs regular monitoring. Hence there was a need for a solution to help organizations track their AWS expenses, analyze costs, provide recommendations based on usage, and improve savings. Thankfully, technology has come to the rescue of such organizations, and today, a few solutions focus specifically on AWS cost optimization.

This review will focus on CloudKeeper – an advanced AWS FinOps platform that guarantees cloud spending savings from day one to organizations of all sizes. Through this review, we will cover the following points:

• What is CloudKeeper?
• Key Features of CloudKeeper
• Our Final Verdict

So let’s unpack what CloudKeeper is all about, shall we?

Introduction To CloudKeeper

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW is an end-to-end FinOps solution that provides Savings, a Software analytics platform, Services & Support, all bundled into one solution. CloudKeeper guarantees a 5-15% savings on your AWS bills without any volume commitment. With our analytics platform, CK Lens, you can track and manage your Cloud spending instantly. It will give you a detailed view of your infrastructure usage costs, where you need to optimize, your billing break-ups, daily cost usage, and more. It provides savings, service, and support to organizations wanting to reduce AWS costs with features like cost analysis dashboards, recommendations, on-demand instances, price optimization audits, and more.

CloudKeeper has helped over 200 global organizations, such as CreditSense, TataSky, and FEN Learning, save millions through its advanced expenditure monitoring and analysis. It offers freedom from long-term commitments without upfront payment or lock-in and guarantees savings from Day 1.

CloudKeeper offers enhanced visibility, transparency, and savings opportunities in AWS spending, which is essential for businesses. It provides complete visibility into your cloud expenses and is created for business users and decision-makers. Additionally, its pay-as-you-use pricing and 90-day free trial model ensure that customers derive the true value from it. 

CloudKeeper’s software offering – is an analytics platform called ‘CK Lens’ (CloudKeeper Lens), which helps you manage and track your cloud spending in real time. It gives a detailed overview of your cloud infrastructure usage costs, provides recommendations, and offers a detailed breakup of daily expenses and billings.

Now that we know CloudKeeper let’s dive in to discover its best features.

Key Features of CloudKeeper

Below are the best features of CloudKeeper that put it in a league of its own:

1. Guaranteed Savings

CloudKeeper guarantees savings of 5-15% on your AWS expenses and offers detailed billing information based on service type, geography, and each line item. The application is designed to help businesses mitigate the AWS spend on reserved instances (RI), including even the servers used during peak business hours.

2. Billing Dashboard

With CloudKeeper, you can get a detailed breakdown of daily expenses, average daily spending, chargebacks, and expenditures made in the last seven days. You can choose a cost summary or a detailed view of your spending in its dashboard, along with monthly forecasts and cost breakups. Furthermore, the dashboard can be configured to display various data and statistics.

CloudKeeper also offers you a resource-level breakup of your cloud service costs. You can add as many users as you want to view your data or send information via email through the application.

3. Resource Level Cost Breakup

With CloudKeeper, you can better understand each component of a cloud service’s costs. You can easily find the charges incurred for each EC2 instance to identify the ones that cost you the most. You can find the price per server/bucket/folder and get usage statistics for reserved, on-demand, spot instances, and deep dive into your S3 charges. CloudKeeper also allows you to configure notifications and integrates seamlessly with your email and slack.

CloudKeeper also offers a heatmap that displays monthly AWS cost variations, enabling you to understand where your money is going. It also shows you the areas where you can save more and where you are overspending. 

4. Easy Price Comparison

With CK Lens, you can get an idea of server cost variations in the last four months to understand how prices have changed. This allows you to do a cost versus benefits analysis and let go of services you don’t need anymore. You can also identify specific usage types for AWS services in case of any sudden rise or fall in costs.

5. Flexible Service

CloudKeeper offers you the freedom to run servers on-demand at RI rates. Depending on your current business needs, you scale up or down with no prior notice or extra costs. Unlike other applications, there are no minimum billing commitments or lock-in periods in CloudKeeper. 

6. Risk-free Price Optimization

Another significant advantage of CloudKeeper is that it owns all the commitment obligations with AWS and aggressively commits to 3-year plans, allowing it to pass on its 1-year reserved pricing to you. Additionally, it offers complimentary cost monitoring and quarterly audits for spend optimization, which helps your business to evolve constantly with the changing times.

Our Final Verdict

CloudKeeper is a feature-packed FinOps solution that simplifies AWS cost management for businesses through technology. It offers guaranteed savings with instant benefits at no additional risk, which is a big plus for any business. Moreover, it provides you the flexibility of on-demand instances at the cost of a savings plan. 

We were impressed by its unique features like a responsive billing dashboard, pricing recommendations, spend analysis, periodic monitoring, and audits. We also loved its simple and user-friendly interface and the option to drill down to granular details. Hence, we are inclined to give it a perfect ten as our final score due to its features, innovativeness, and flexibility.

What do you think of CloudKeeper? Let us know in the comments below.