A Year Of Innovation: CloudZero’s Major Product Enhancements In 2023

Another year, another quantum leap in public cloud spending. 2022 saw organizations spend $491 billion on the public cloud; not to be outdone, 2023’s $563.6 billion marked the first year that public cloud spending exceeded half a trillion dollars.

Accelerating cloud spend mixed with shaky macroeconomic conditions meant one thing: Efficiency has never been a higher priority for cloud-driven organizations. And for organizations committed to getting efficient in the cloud, CloudZero has never been a stronger partner.

In addition to netting $41M in Series B funding, more than doubling our business, and helping some of the world’s most innovative companies accelerate their FinOps journeys, CloudZero spent 2023 transforming our platform. Already the market-leading solution for cost visibility, CloudZero added a host of features and capabilities that made it simpler to get more sophisticated insights from your cloud cost data.

From the 24 major releases, 21 minor releases, and more than 1,000 operational tasks completed in 2023, this blog isolates the five most significant and best-loved by our customers. For a comprehensive account of all product updates in 2023, check out our Product Release Notes Archive, which sorts updates by month.

CloudZero’s 5 Most Impactful Product Enhancements In 2023

Unit Economics API

Now more than ever, organizations want to leverage unit economics to measure the efficiency of their cloud spending. Our Unit Economics API lets customers get data into the CloudZero’s Analytics feature (more on Analytics below) and turn it into customized unit metric reports.

The Unit Economics API further simplifies the process of creating custom unit metrics, quantifying the efficiency of your cloud spending, and making informed decisions about how to improve your efficiency.

Analytics

In CostFormation®, CloudZero already had the world’s most powerful allocation engine. With Analytics, we added the most powerful visualization engine.

Analytics gives CloudZero customers a combination of standard and custom dashboards which let them view their cloud spend data through any lens in a matter of clicks. Whether that’s a quick assessment of their tagging coverage or a more in-depth calculation of cost per monthly active user, Analytics makes data visualization and reporting simple for a wide range of use cases and users across the organization.

For an in-depth look at all Analytics is capable of, read on.

Automated Insights

One of the main benefits of managing billions of dollars of cloud spend is you start to notice patterns. Organizations of x size tend to spend $y on EC2 — and if your organization is spending substantially more (or less), you might want to investigate.

With Automated Insights, CloudZero automatically applies these patterns to individual customers’ cloud spend, and alerts them to abnormal spend events. Each alert shows up in CloudZero’s Insights feature, which displays a list of affected resources, potential cost savings, difficulty to address, status, and more.

Resources covered by Automated Insights include:

… and more. Click here for an in-depth look at Automated Insights.

Datadog Integration

The easier it is to get 100% of your cloud spend into CloudZero, the easier it is for us to accelerate your cloud efficiency. That’s why we’ve developed numerous integrations — for vendors like New Relic, MongoDB, Databricks, Snowflake, SumoLogic, and most recently, Datadog.

CloudZero’s Datadog integration simplifies the process of ingesting your Datadog spend, normalizing it in a common data model, and allocating it alongside all your other cloud spend. For a deep-dive into how it works, check out our documentation.

GCP Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Support

Kubernetes is epic both for compute orchestration and data complexity — leading to both engineering breakthroughs and billing headaches (respectively). With GCP GKE support, we enhanced our already-industry-leading Kubernetes visibility offerings, now with the power to subject your GKE spend to all the same visibility and optimization functionality as the rest of your cloud, PaaS, and SaaS spend.

That’s Not All, Folks

The “Era of Efficient Engineering,” as CloudZero’s founder and CTO Erik Peterson recently termed it, has only just begun. As cloud spend closes in on that unthinkable $1 trillion threshold, efficiency will only become a more central tenet of great cloud architecture.

To make efficient innovation a reality, look no further than CloudZero. With complete visibility, automated alerts, sophisticated reporting, and more, CloudZero is the only platform to power engineering-led optimization. Next-generation cloud cost optimization starts with engineers — and engineers turn to CloudZero.

Ready to see these features and more in action? Request a demo today.

Author: Dustin Lowman

Dustin Lowman, a FinOps certified practitioner, takes no small pleasure in applying his English major’s sensibility to the SaaS world. Dustin also writes, performs, and records original music, and has never met a cardigan he didn’t like.