The flexibility and scalability of public cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and GCP are springboards for innovation and rapid growth. But as businesses grow and evolve, managing and reducing wasteful spending (which many companies estimate at 21–50% of their cloud expenditure), can fall off your team’s radar.
Enter cloud cost optimization tools. These powerful platforms offer comprehensive visibility into your cloud spend, empowering you to monitor, analyze, and ultimately reduce unnecessary expenses.
In this blog post, we'll explore the key features and benefits of these tools and help you choose the right one for your organization.
Cloud cost optimization isn’t just a finance problem. It’s an engineering, security, and business challenge. The best tools bring these stakeholders together with shared visibility and context.
Let’s start with the features that separate the best tools from the pack.
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Must-have features in a cloud cost optimization tool
Choosing the right tool is the only way to truly optimize your cloud spending.
Ideal cloud cost optimization solutions offer a combination of detailed visibility, actionable insights, and automation. They actively identify waste, suggest improvements, and help both engineering and finance make smart, data-driven decisions.
To ensure significant cloud cost savings, select a solution that offers…
Multi-cloud support
Comprehensive multi-cloud support is probably the single most important feature a cloud cost optimization tool should have. This means the tool should be able to ingest and analyze cost data from all the leading cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Specifically, you’ll want to pick a tool that provides these features:
Centralized data and analysis: Information silos frequently result in hidden costs and cloud waste. By centralizing data aggregation, strong cost optimization tools provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of your entire cloud expenditure.
Normalization of different cloud billing models: Here’s where the true complexity of multi-cloud environments comes into play. Network data transfer pricing varies significantly by provider, region, and service – including intra-region rules and service-specific inclusions. Always verify egress and discount interactions on official pricing pages for your target services and regions.
More layers of complexity? Factors like the dynamic nature of spot instance pricing (which varies continuously and independently across cloud environments) and changes in currency exchange rates (which can have a big impact on the cost for global deployments). A truly effective cost optimization solution will translate these nuanced invoicing details into a single, easily understood format, enabling precise cost comparisons and informed decision-making across your multi-cloud footprint.
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Real-time or near real-time visibility
Traditional billing reports frequently have delays of hours or even days, meaning you’re always playing catch-up with incurred costs, and there’s no way to stay on top of spending, let alone optimize it. For effective cloud cost optimization, you need near real-time visibility into your spending.
To provide near real-time, event-driven cost signals, the best optimization tools combine infrastructure events (like provisioning via AWS CloudTrail or Azure Activity Logs), budgets and anomaly detections, and frequent billing export refreshes. Infrastructure events (such as allocating a new resource) can trigger immediate alerts, but actual cost data updates depend on each cloud provider’s billing pipeline cadence – typically hourly to daily.
The bottom line? Traditional delayed reporting is no match for today’s environments. On the other hand, instant feedback empowers teams to make quick adjustments and builds a culture of cost-consciousness. Better yet? Once organizations identify and address cost anomalies as soon as they arrive, minor inefficiencies can never morph into runaway costs.
Service-level and team-level cost breakdowns
If no one fully understands or is held accountable for specific components of a cloud bill, organizations can face major budget overruns without seeing any way to break the pattern of wasted spend.
Assigning cost accountability requires in-depth visibility, which turns abstract cloud bills into actionable information for the teams in charge of cloud consumption.
Look for a tool that provides:
Granular cost attribution across multiple dimensions, including applications, environments, Kubernetes namespaces, and individual teams
Tag enforcement and policy as code (PaC) help you define governance and cost-allocation policies as code (such as OPA/Rego, AWS Tag Policies, or Azure Policy) and enforce them programmatically across your cloud estate.
These features let you directly link infrastructure spend to particular deliverables or respective teams, such as cost per pod, cost per service, cost per namespace, cost per cluster, and cost per label.
Automated recommendations
When it comes to taming costs, automated recommendations make all the difference. Prioritize tools that can…
Identify waste in services (think EC2, EBS, or EKS)
Identify idle or underutilized resources throughout your cloud environment
Provide accurate rightsizing recommendations based on real usage data to ensure resources are scaled appropriately
Enable lifecycle enforcement to prevent cloud storage sprawl, and manage discount instruments – such as AWS Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Azure Reservations, and GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) – to right-size commitments alongside rightsizing. Best practices include setting coverage targets, avoiding over-commitment, and automating renewal reviews.
These proactive, data-driven suggestions ensure you only pay for what is absolutely essential. They also transform cloud cost optimization into an ongoing process without stretching your teams too thin.
Integration with engineering workflows
An efficient cost optimization tool must be able to work in harmony with current engineering processes. Pick a tool that…
Sends cost insights straight to engineers via Slack, Jira, or CI/CD alerts, ensuring quick awareness
Supports policy as code (for example, OPA/Rego) and integrates with infrastructure as code tools (like Terraform), so you can embed cost governance into pipelines and proactively prevent expensive deployments.
Offers remediation recommendations to make fixes a snap
In practice, these tips could look like integrating Kubernetes cost monitoring into CI/CD loops and on-call runbooks. This would enable real-time alerts on cost spikes and even automate reserved-instance reviews.
Context-aware optimization
By linking costs with security posture, exposure paths, and resource ownership in a unified graph, organizations can pinpoint high-risk, high-cost resources – like an EKS cluster on extended support with public exposure – enabling precise, risk-aware savings.
By making it obvious what a resource is, who owns it, and whether it is secure or critical, the best tools enable teams to take effective action. Correlation provides unparalleled insights: for instance, high expenses linked to a weak security posture may indicate that misconfigurations are driving excessive data transfer costs or inefficient resource use.
TL;DR: Correlating cost and security posture identifies waste and the underlying (potentially dangerous) flaws that caused it.
Cloud cost optimization tool categories
Cloud cost management is a broad field with a huge selection of tools, each designed to handle distinct organizational requirements and technical complexities. Understanding how different types of tools stack up can help you select the best solution for your optimization objectives.
Cloud provider–native tools
Each major cloud provider offers native cost-management tools:
AWS: Cost Explorer, Cost Anomaly Detection, and AWS Budgets provide detailed usage breakdowns, anomaly detection, and budget alerts.
Azure: Cost Management + Billing offers cost analysis, forecasting, and budget controls.
Google Cloud: Billing Reports and Budgets support cost tracking and alerting.
These tools are great for single-cloud environments and provide basic visualization and recommendations, but they often lack the deep, multi-cloud, or Kubernetes-level granularity needed for complex organizations.
When looking for coarse-grained information, such as the total cost per EKS cluster or the cumulative cost of a particular service in an account, these tools can be effective. All providers offer basic information about what you used, how much of it you used, and how much it cost. This information is often accompanied by visualization tools and some level of automated recommendations.
Organizations with relatively simple, single-cloud deployments or those just beginning their cloud cost optimization journey will find cloud providers’ tools helpful. But the depth of this insight often falls short of the extremely detailed, real-time attribution needed for complex, shared cloud environments.
In complex, shared environments like Kubernetes, cloud providers’ tools can fail to provide comprehensive pod-level or service-level cost attribution. So although they provide basic insights, they typically fall short for organizations looking for deep, actionable optimization and automated cost governance, due to their lack of fine-grained data and generally limited automation features.
Cloud Cost Management Software: Choosing the right platform for visibility and control
Read moreFinOps and cost-governance platforms
Examples: Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth, Spot by NetApp
FinOps and cost-governance platforms provide a more comprehensive approach by integrating and controlling cloud spending throughout an entire organization. With their support for namespace and label-based cost allocation, these advanced solutions are especially good at providing detailed cost allocation for Kubernetes environments. They often integrate with different financial systems and are designed to monitor and evaluate spending across a wide range of cloud resources.
By offering shared visibility and accountability, FinOps and cost-governance platforms enable finance, engineering, and operations to collaborate more effectively, allowing enterprises to forecast, manage, and optimize cloud finances at scale.
Engineering-centric optimization platforms
Examples: Kubecost, OpenCost
Engineering-centric optimization platforms are a potent category for businesses looking for maximum control and in-depth technical insights. This might involve creating DIY monitoring stacks using open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana along with custom cost models. (Keep in mind this method requires a great deal of engineering work for setup, upkeep, and continuous improvement, despite providing unmatched control and customization.)
As an alternative, specialized open-source solutions like Kubecost provide features and pre-built dashboards created especially for tracking Kubernetes costs. Even so, manual tuning and configuration are still necessary to meet specific organizational needs. A common strategy organizations use? Taking native cloud provider metrics as a starting point and then incorporating open-source or specialized multi-cloud solutions.
How to evaluate cloud cost tools
Start by defining your top priority: Is it strict engineering policy enforcement, comprehensive cost reporting for finance, or broad optimization projects encompassing both?
Next, think about who is responsible for cloud costs: Is it the platform engineering group, the FinOps team, or a shared responsibility across multiple teams? By presenting cost data in its operational context, the best tools provide engineers with the confidence to optimize.
Consider your visibility needs: Do you just need billing information, or do you need more in-depth knowledge about the context of your resources (like how to link costs to particular applications, security posture, or usage patterns)?
Assess the tool's remediation capabilities: Can it identify possible savings and enable your teams to take effective and safe action on those findings?
Prioritize seamless integration: It’s crucial to integrate CI/CD pipelines and alerting tools seamlessly so that engineers can get pertinent, real-time cost feedback right in their workflows.
Context-aware cloud cost optimization with Wiz
By now, we’ve seen that when it comes to cloud cost optimization, context is the secret sauce, and that’s where Wiz shines. Wiz sets itself apart from other CNAPPs by integrating cost optimization with in-depth security insights that give you full visibility throughout your entire cloud estate, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Here’s a closer look at what Wiz brings to the table:
Wiz uses an agentless, graph-backed ingestion method to pull important data, such as billing exports, Kubernetes cluster metadata, configmaps, and security posture findings, into the unified Wiz Security Graph. The best cost optimization tools use agentless ingestion across clouds and Kubernetes, reducing operational overhead and increasing coverage – especially critical for organizations with many accounts and clusters.
Wiz detects wasteful patterns like "zombie pods," unattached storage volumes, and outdated Kubernetes versions, including Amazon EKS clusters on extended support. Next, we calculate the precise cost impact of each wasteful pattern detected.
Through integrated configuration rules that highlight issues with estimated savings and guide users through the resolution process, Wiz has your remediation needs covered.
Mapping cloud resources back to source repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and responsible teams enables fast accountability and prevents expensive regressions during code reviews and deployments.
By comparing cost data with security posture findings, Wiz identifies resources that undermine your security and contribute to an increase in cloud costs.
Wiz seamlessly integrates with CI/CD pipelines and engineering workflows, enabling teams to take action safely by giving clear context about the ownership, purpose, and security status of a resource.
Wiz's ultimate goal? To keep you in charge of your cloud invoices without slowing you down. With Wiz, you can expect real-time insights that enable finance, security, and DevOps teams to work together efficiently, cutting down on unnecessary spending without hindering development.
Want to see context-aware cost optimization in action—without slowing engineering down? Schedule a demo.
Manage Cloud Costs with Wiz
Learn how Wiz combines security insights with cost visibility to maximize business outcomes.
