DIY cloud cost management: The strategic case for building your own tools

“You don’t know when it will be written, and you must be ready to consume it. So, [larger customers must] be able to consume that subset of data and run all of the kinds of jobs they want to run on top of it — moving by tags, moving by account ID or business unit, whatever the case might be, in a meaningful way that they can react quickly,” he says.

Here, a DIY approach can help enterprise IT teams be more nimble in making adjustments to their cloud resource use, thereby keeping fine-grained, responsive control over cloud usage before costs have a chance to spike.

Anatomy of a DIY cloud cost management program

For most enterprises, custom cloud cost management strategies will begin by leveraging tools available from CSPs themselves.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all provide native tools for monitoring your cloud usage and spend within their respective cloud platforms.

Chris Hennesey, an enterprise strategist with AWS and a former technology CFO for Capital One, advises enterprises CIOs to first consider cloud-native tools from their CSP.

“For AWS, many of the key capabilities are tools available to all our customers, such as AWS Cost Explorer and the AWS Cost and Usage report,” he says. “Recently, AWS also announced Cost Optimization Hub, which centralizes many cloud cost recommendations.”