February 07, 2019
Review: "CloudCheckr will save you more than Geico"
We host our SaaS platform on AWS, and it has grown rather large over the years. We originally got CloudCheckr just so we could figure out what reserved instances we ought to purchase. Getting this detail figured out without having to spend a day or more doing it manually already saved us more than the cost of CloudCheckr. As we got other details aligned with their recommended best practices, we purchased their other modules, again seeing immediate savings. AWS can be large and complex, and having the right tools is critical to managing it all without losing your mind.
- Detailed Best Practices. It's important to align your cloud to industry best practices for security and cost—it just performs better if it's used the way it's meant to be used. AWS is very flexible, and that's great when you have special requirements, but you've got to at least know when you're using something in a non-standard way so you can think through the implications.
- Cost Reduction. Some recommendations are almost impossible to make at least for our setup, but many, many others are easy. We only have to log into CloudCheckr every few months and make a few changes for it to more than pay for itself.
- Right-Sizing. This is related to the other points, but for some reason is separate from their cost module. The metrics it's able to pull only tell half the story, so it's good to verify it's sizing recommendations before making changes. But it does show you what instances to focus on first, and even if you choose a slightly different size to move it to, it does clearly indicate it's current size isn't appropriate. And this works both ways, if the size is too big, you can save some cash by making it smaller, but if it's too small, you want to be sure to scale up before you run into performance problems.
- UI can be difficult to navigate. Given the amount of data, it's not surprising, but I often launch the different reports in multiple tabs so I don't get lost.
- Can be expensive. Not in our case, but you probably want to check and make sure you'll see significant cost savings that'll pay for the product as we did.
