With nearly a third of all cloud spending being wasted, managing cloud resources efficiently is critical to controlling spiraling costs. StackSpot Cloud Services provides platform engineering teams with the transparency they need and actionable recommendations to control costs and manage cloud environments more effectively.
Critical Functions of StackSpot Cloud Services
With the StackSpot Enterprise Developer Platform (EDP), you get complete control of your cloud environment, including dashboard, report, and insight to optimize cost and usage.
Dashboard
StackSpot provides a dashboard that shows your current monthly consumption. With StackSpot’s dashboard, you have complete visibility and control for proactive cloud management.
Report
You can also get detailed on-demand report to provide transparency into historical cloud resource consumption and associated costs.
Insight
Leveraging cutting-edge analytics, StackSpot Insight goes beyond basic reporting to provide intelligent recommendations that drive cost savings and operational improvement.
Right-sizing your workloads is the most effective way to control cloud spend. With StackSpot, you get continuous analysis of usage and spending to identify idle and underutilized resources, recommend purchasing reservations, and right-size workloads. With Insights, you don’t just get historical data — you get actionable recommendations to optimize your environment in real time. This saves teams from hours of manual analysis while unlocking significant cost-reduction opportunities.
Benefits of Using StackSpot Cloud Services
StackSpot Cloud Services optimizes FinOps, SRE, Security, and Runtime.
FinOps
StackSpot delivers best-in-class FinOps capabilities for budgeting, cost monitoring, analysis, and optimization. With this suite of FinOps tools, you can gain control of your cloud spend.
Dashboard
Dashboards are beyond basic usage charts You can leverage dashboard, performance report, and insights to gain complete visibility into your spending.
Alerts on Cost Anomalies and Optimization
Automated alerts notify you of discrepancies so you can take the appropriate action. You can configure any alert from your cloud provider via a ticket.
Alerts notify you if there is an opportunity to reduce costs in a given application so you can take timely action without dealing with alert fatigue or cognitive overload.
Other alerts that can aid optimization include:
- Changes to machine or instance size
- Changes to machine or instance type
- Shut down non-productive environments (weekends / holidays)
SRE
Besides controlling costs, StackSpot also helps you improve reliability through Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) capabilities — providing high availability so developers teams can operate efficiently and productively.
Continuous monitoring
You can configure real-time monitoring across your cloud environment for:
- Servers
- Databases
- Security groups
- Lambda function
- Custom resources
With StackSpot, site reliability engineering and uptime get a significant boost.
Alerts on WAF, PRR, and Security policies
Resiliency is crucial to harnessing cloud value. If any outages, errors, or policy violations occur, intelligent alerts notify your team so you can take corrective action. Specific capabilities around Well-Architected Framework (WAF), Production Readiness Review (PRR), and Security Policies enable preventing downtime and maintaining peak performance even amid incidents.
Security
Cloud attacks are increasing in volume, scale, and cost. PwC’s 2024 Global Digital Trust Insights report finds that the number of businesses experiencing more than $1 million cloud data breaches has increased by a third over the past year. Those reporting breaches saw an average of $4.4 million in damage.
Cloud security must be a top priority. Here is how StackSpot can help.
Alerts on Non-standard Security Practices
StackSpot’s technology solutions are an early warning system for any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that pose cybersecurity risks. The platform continuously analyzes settings and configurations across your integration to scan for potential risks. This includes detecting open security groups, unprotected S3 buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, weak password policies, and more.
Whenever a misconfiguration is identified, alerts are sent to administrators to address issues before any breach occurs.
400 Guard Rails Available to Use
Taking cloud security a step further, StackSpot offers over 400+ out-of-the-box guardrails grounded in the best practices in cloud computing. A sampling of guardrails include:
- Performing encryption on S3 buckets
- Monitoring Lambdas that have public access
- Monitoring if ALB/NLB is exposed to the internet
- Monitoring EC2 instances that do not use certified AMIs
- Deleting the API Gateway Stage if it is not approved
- Performing blocking on S3 buckets that are not tagged as private
These policies provide preventative controls across cost, security, reliability, and performance, safeguarding your cloud by design and ensuring adherence to standards. With hundreds of curated guardrails, configuring a hardened cloud security posture is streamlined for ease of use.
StackSpot Runtime
StackSpot provides a cloud native runtime that eases how infrastructure is provisioned and how applications are deployed to the complex underlying cloud. By using a built-in runtime, StackSpot is able to seamlessly keep application and dependent infrastructure (cloud resources) connected and ensure that critical policies (guard rails) are enforced during deployment and operation.
Integrate Infrastructure Deployment With the Development Portal
Beyond monitoring existing environments, StackSpot provides native integration with leading DevOps tools like Terraform to embed security, governance, and FinOps best practices directly into infrastructure deployment scripts.
Any time resources are provisioned or updated. They are validated against configured guardrails with alerts generated for violations.
Drifts and Reconciliation Tools
Drift analysis also continuously checks for unauthorized changes to critical configurations or policies post-deployment. Reconciliation can self-heal environments when unauthorized changes occur.
With StackSpot’s robust automation tooling, cloud security and reliability can be embedded everywhere cloud resources are provisioned or updated.
Improve Efficiency, Reliability, and Cloud Spend
StackSpot Cloud Services offers a complete set of capabilities spanning an intuitive dashboard, detailed report, powerful insights, FinOps best practices, SRE monitoring, and hardened cloud security to help organizations effectively operate in the cloud.
With StackSpot, organizations finally have a comprehensive solution that makes it easier than ever to unlock the agility of the cloud while controlling costs and minimizing business risk.
With today’s cloud importance, you need a Developer Platform that makes complex environments more efficient — and reliable — to build the technology that impacts your business. StackSpot Cloud Services supports the main cloud providers on the market.
Find out what we can do for your cloud journey. Book a demo today.
Sources:
Percentage of cloud computing spend wasted in organizations worldwide in 2020
