Discover What’s Next: Jan2024 CloudForecast Updates

🎊🎉🍾 Happy New Year!

The end of 2023 marks the fifth year since Francois and I quit our full-time jobs to work on CloudForecast. What a journey it has been! We’ve navigated the highs and lows that accompany building an independent, self-funded startup, and we’ve done it together, adhering to our principle of treating our customers right.

This past month, Francois and I met in San Diego to celebrate this milestone with our families. We are both deeply grateful for this incredible journey and the opportunity to work with such amazing customers. If you’re reading this, that means YOU!

Curious to learn more about our beginnings? I recorded an episode on Startups for the Rest Of Us, detailing our journey early on.

TL;DR

• New: NewTagging Center Visualizations and Dashboards
• Improvement: ZeroWaste Cost Optimization New Policies and Trusted Advisor Integration

NEW: New Tagging Center Visualizations and Dashboards

We’ve upgraded the former Monthly Excel Tagging Report to a more visually engaging user experience within the app. Users who have access to this feature will now find a new menu titled “Tagging Center,” featuring two options: “Tagging Compliance” and “Tagging Detective.”

In the “Tagging Compliance” menu, users can view a table displaying all AWS resources not adhering to your organization’s tagging strategy.

In addition, we provide an Overview Graphs to help users answer common tagging questions they might have:

• What’s my Overall Compliance?
• What’s my Compplaicen by Accounts?
• What’s my Compliance by Products
• What’s my Compliance by Tags?

In the “Tagging Detective” menu, users have the ability to drill down into a specific tag key or value, enabling them to answer the following questions quickly:

• What’s my Compliance?
• What are my top resources?

Similar to our Cost Detective Tool, any links generated by the investigation in the Tagging Detective menu are shareable. This feature allows you to communicate easily with your team or resource owners about resources that need tagging or to provide a summary of resources grouped under a set of tag keys and/or values.

IMPROVEMENT: ZeroWaste Updates. New Policies and Trusted Advisor Integration

We’ve enhanced our functionality to identify EBS volumes in EC2 and RDS that could benefit from shifting from GP2 to GP3, offering cost savings and performance improvements. We recently wrote an article about migrating EC2 EBS Volumes from GP2 the GP3.

Additionally, we’ve integrated Trusted Advisor into our platform, providing a consolidated view of resources. This integration helps pinpoint and eliminate unnecessary expenses and resources, all from a single view. Our goal is not to replace Trusted Advisor but to offer a singular report that can be shareable with your engineering team.

What’s Next for 1h2024:

• CloudForecast Housekeeping: We’re rewriting a few features from Scala to Rails. This transition will open up new features and allow users greater flexibility in creating reports. Why did we start with Scala 5 years ago? Ask Francois… LOL
• Daily Cost Report Flexibility and Customization: Following our housekeeping efforts at CloudForecast, we plan to introduce new settings that allow users to send out fully customizable reports. For instance, users will have the ability to create and deliver daily cost reports that show only specific products or graphs of their choice.
• Containers Cost Management – ECS/EKS/K8s Cost Reports

ICYMI – Helpful Resource to help you Manage AWS Costs

• Amazon EBS Volumes: gp2 vs gp3 Analysis
• AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) Guide
• Discover What’s Next: Sept2023 CloudForecast Updates