Excellent developer oriented AWS cost management platform
What do you like best?
Provides exposure to cost data very well to engineers with an intuitive interface and anomaly detection via Slack. We were able to quickly identify a number of areas to eliminate waste, and have caught more than a few changes that where simple changes to the application saved us thousands of dollars a month.
Since the application engineering teams have so much control of our cloud infrastructure costs and want to do the right thing giving them exposure to this data has let us do the 80/20 optimizations that significantly reduce our bill with minimal effort.
A small example was a refactoring of code that interacted with S3 for our Pages product. The new code was making GET requests where only HEAD requests were needed. CloudZero reported a cost anomaly within a day of deployment and it was seen and fixed by the team that owned the service the following day. The feedback cycle was quick enough that the code was still top of mind for the engineer, so we ended up with very little wasted spend and the fix was fast to implement.
What do you dislike?
The platform doesn't have support for GCP, which we also use and could use similar tooling for.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Providing transparency into AWS costs and helping us reduce them with minimal effort and cross team coordination.
Getting cost data closer to the employees that are making the decisions that impact it. The cost impact of changes for workloads that have moved from colocation facilities to AWS are largely controlled by the application development team, not the infrastructure team.
