The market for third-party cloud cost management and optimization tools is mind-bogglingly crowded with more than one hundred active vendors in this field, including CloudHealth and Yotascale. Hundreds more suppliers can be found in ancillary cloud software marketplaces that "also perform" cost management. How can you choose what to buy when so many options exist? Making no choice at all and maintaining the status quo might be tempting.
To be honest, we often hear this when enterprises put CloudHealth on their short list of solutions to examine. Someone has utilized CloudHealth before, perhaps at another company, or for so long that they don't know any other method. The fear of the unknown or the unfamiliar is a powerful anchor. Business-as-usual is better than an undesirable decision. When enterprises pick Yotascale over CloudHealth, we frequently overcome this perspective.
Read the case study: How Hulu creates a culture of Cloud spend awareness →
I understand change can be scary and uncomfortable. If you’re exploring options, you’ve experienced some level of discomfort. So, whether you’re considering CloudHealth as a new or former user, I want to help you decide when the time comes by sharing why others have chosen Yotascale over CloudHealth.
When we ask customers, their answers almost always align with one (or all) of the following reasons.
1. High user adoption, notably among engineers
Hundreds of software engineers and users utilize Yotascale in financial, FinOps, CloudOps, SRE, and DevOps roles. We've heard CloudHealth doesn’t experience the adoption Yotascale has with engineers. That poses a significant challenge when attempting to cultivate a culture of cloud cost awareness throughout a business.
Even if you have a centralized FinOps team with admins and power users or a Cloud Center of Excellence, your success will be constrained if you can’t promote a culture of cloud cost awareness throughout your organization. People who pick Yotascale believe in this core idea: Engineering adoption is crucial for reducing cloud costs.
One finance executive in a large (10,000+ employees) enterprise recently lamented: “I spend a million dollars a year or more on CloudHealth, and there are only 15 people who use it.” Ouch.
2. A trusted and reliable pricing structure
Another common justification for choosing Yotascale is, "I'm tired of paying a percentage of the bill," which brings me to my next point.
Traditionally, CloudHealth charges you roughly 3% of your total cloud payment. In theory, it has a straightforward pricing system. But what transpires if a cost increase remains unnoticed for a few days or weeks? It's been known to happen when only a handful of individuals utilize the tool designed to catch such things. Whether you anticipated it or not, you must pay CloudHealth (VMware, shortly to be Broadcom) extra if your cloud bill increases. Fixed annual pricing for a contracted amount of spending may be attainable. Still, if your spending exceeds that amount, you will incur an overage penalty of—you guessed it—three percent.
Yotascale has an annual fixed pricing based on the number of resource hours consumed (e.g., EC2 and RDS instances). We consider your past and projected consumption when it's time for renewal and, if necessary, move you to a different pricing tier. The peace of mind that results from knowing precisely what to expect in bills each month is invaluable.
3. Granular allocation without precise tags
What else is invaluable? Not having to spend a significant amount of time manually tagging every resource just to receive erroneous, pointless, or irrelevant recommendations in exchange (wasting even more time). This is allegedly the case with CloudHealth, which heavily relies on tags. If your tagging approach and cleanliness are not ideal, CloudHealth will use incorrect or insufficient cost data, limiting how far your cost optimization efforts can go.
Tags will never be ideal; let's face it. Business and infrastructure evolve too quickly and frequently. Yotascale can handle that; in fact, it performs well in challenging environments.
Yotascale reports on tagged, untagged, and incorrectly tagged resources in multi-cloud systems, including containers and shared resources. This is achieved by fusing tag data with other resource- and business-level data. Additionally, it can add, update, fix, and normalize tags for you in line with your organizational structures for business and technology. Even with disorganized or missing tags, Yotascale ensures that every cent is precisely recorded—and counted only once. You get 100% allocation without the dreaded “death by tagging.”
4. Real-time and intelligent container cost management
Microservice deployment using containers has grown in popularity and become a standard practice in modern cloud architecture. Yotascale offers comprehensive container cost management and insights in Docker and Kubernetes(K8s) deployments across the three major cloud providers(AWS, GCP, or Azure). Real-time container cost metrics and precise cost attribution to your business units is inevitable in the platform.
"Actionable" recommendations to right-size under-utilization of containers is available with a clear and concise setup into the platform. Even more intriguing is that we can obtain this data without the need for an agent installation.
CloudHealth, on the other hand, needs an agent installed to bring in any sort of container cost metrics, and it keeps them separate in their own perspectives. You don’t get that combined multi-cloud + container view like you do with Yotascale. You won’t get any recommendations on container utilization from CloudHealth, either.
Watch the webinar: Yotascale Cost Management for Containers and Kubernetes →
5. Effective user interaction
Yotascale's more modern approach to cloud cost management is largely responsible for the great user uptake I previously noted.
The post-mortem analysis of cloud bills—after the money has already been spent—was the purpose of first-generation tools like CloudHealth. In a typical organization, finance would produce and export reports, meet with engineers once a month, and then discuss potential and necessary changes to save costs. Cloud cost management operates more top-down and reactively in that case.
Yotascale began by using a bottom-up approach. It was designed primarily to provide engineers with direct control over cloud resources with near-real-time notifications on cost-saving opportunities and anomalies that could drive up costs.
Since cost is typically not an engineer's key focus area, Yotascale aims to enable engineering users to access and exit the product as quickly as possible. Alerts are specific about the resources, factors, and options taken into account and communicated to the appropriate individuals at the right moments. Access and views can be customized and filtered.
Without a doubt, financial analysts can have a lot of fun crunching numbers with Yotascale, which fully supports centralized cloud strategies and budgeting. Users who want to examine unit economics may dive into Yotascale's reports and dashboards, go deeply into business and technical hierarchies, and export data to spreadsheets or other systems.
6. Faster recognition of value
Not to mention, Yotascale is proven to be quicker and more responsive than CloudHealth. According to what we've heard, outcomes from CloudHealth can take months to manifest due to factors including prolonged onboarding, challenges in setting up perspectives, and poor user acceptance.
Regarding cost allocation, Yotascale handles all the attribution work, making mapping costs to business hierarchies/unit economics incredibly simple to manage while providing you more time to focus on your priorities.
With Yotascale, you already see results by the end of your 2-week free trial (POC), which uses your own cloud cost data. If you choose Yotascale, your trial account simply becomes your active customer account with unlimited cloud provider accounts, unlimited cloud spend, and unlimited users. [🎤 drop.]
Try Yotascale for yourself
Don’t allow "analysis-paralysis" to prevent you from making a choice that could greatly simplify your life. Whether you work in engineering, finance, or FinOps, Yotascale can make you more productive as you contribute to controlling cloud expenses.
It's a sign that you're ready for a change if you're already utilizing CloudHealth and have been considering whether there might be a better option available. Yotascale isn’t for everyone, but it’s worth exploring. Be sure to request a demo when you're ready. In the meantime, feel free to explore our product—it's only getting better.
