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Competitive Analysis: Yotascale Versus CloudZero

Companies are constantly shifting from on-premises to cloud environments. The cloud offers scalability, portability, and hassle-free maintenance. Additionally, it doesn’t require an up-front investment. You only pay for what you use. But although the cost is low initially, you might end up paying for more than needed if you don’t understand the underlying infrastructure.

It’s important to pay close attention to cost management, but it’s hard to constantly manage and watch resources. Cost management tools like Yotascale and CloudZero can be pivotal to unifying and managing costs.

In this article, we compare Yotascale’s and CloudZeros features and functionality in the following areas:

  • Granularity of cost breakdowns
  • Allocation of Kubernetes costs
  • Granularity and automation of tags
  • Cost forecasting and budgeting tools
  • Automated anomaly detection

After comparing these tools, you’ll have a clear idea of the functions and features of each so that you can confidently select the one that will benefit your business the most.

Cost Breakdown Granularity

When choosing a software as a service (SaaS) tool to help reduce cloud costs, knowing what kind of visibility each tool provides into underlying architecture is essential. A granular approach offers the ability to filter and view the costs for each division within an organization, application, service, or team.

Both Yotascale and CloudZero do a decent job of providing cost breakdowns. CloudZero provides cost breakdowns according to the cloud provider, cost for each service, cost for each customer, cost for each environment, and cost for each feature. Similarly, Yotascale provides a cost breakdown by cost center or business unit, team, and application or service. Breaking down costs by business unit is the main advantage of Yotascale’s cost granularity. This breakdown is essential to assessing performance and improving cost savings without compromising performance.

Allocation of Kubernetes Costs

As the world is shifting increasingly towards containerized applications, it’s extremely important to keep an eye on pods, namespaces, and cluster performance to save every buck possible.

CloudZero and Yotascale support Kubernetes cost allocation and provide detailed monitoring of the costs. Both platforms offer the ability to break down the cost of the underlying architecture by namespaces, pods, features, clusters, and teams. Similarly, the real-time use data helps make accurate insights into expenses and make executive decisions. Neither solution requires tagging resources to get a visible granular breakdown.

One thing worth mentioning is that Yotascale uses precise cost data. If your Kubernetes cluster is using reserved Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, it uses the cost associated with the reserved instance rather than the generic one to make the data precise.

Granularity and Automation of Tags

When you’re running a business on a massive scale, tags are important. Tags are key-value pairs that add metadata to the resource. Even though tagging is important, it can be cumbersome if you don’t do it the right way. While Yotascale and CloudZero both offer a granular cost breakdown, their methods of tagging are notably different.

Yotascale offers automated policies for tags allocation that can reach the deepest resources. This is where Yotascale shines. Yotascale provides the ability to set naming policies to mitigate the problem of inconsistent tagging. And, if you already have inconsistent tagging or untagged resources, the scanning feature helps you find them by scanning for all inconsistencies in your tagging policies. So, Yotascale’s automated policies for tags allocation feature ensures that you applied your tags consistently. This provides deeper and more accurate data about the underlying architecture, use, and costs. It helps decision-makers to see the exact use and spending on resources with the best cost breakdown.

Another great feature is that the DevOps team can use inheritance. In this case, the ability to set policies for automated tag assignment to similar resources. This saves a lot of time and ensures that tagging is consistent.

In contrast, CloudZero also focuses on providing a granular level of cost breakdown, but with a different tagging strategy that is less efficient and does not properly represent the shared resources in an organization. And, CloudZero lacks the automatic tagging feature that Yotascale offers.

Cost Forecasting and Budgeting Tools

Businesses want to grow to increase their profits. But, when a business grows, it uses more resources, and if someone isn’t watching the costs of those resources closely, you can find a huge bill lying on your desk.

When it comes to forecasting and budgeting, CloudZero and Yotascale have differences. CloudZero doesn’t offer any dedicated cost forecasting and budgeting tools for cloud resources. The engineering team must rely on watching the cost matrix discussed above to generate its own estimates. Moreover, their cost structure might not match the finance department’s organizational cost-assignment structure. When teams don’t see a direct bill hitting their cost center, they’re not likely to spend time considering or controlling the cost.

Whereas, with the help of advanced machine learning (ML), Yotascale provides dedicated forecasting and budgeting tools, which are more than 95 percent accurate. And, you can integrate those tools with business messaging platforms, such as Slack, to send timely alerts. It works in three simple steps:

  • Budget Creation
  • Forecasting
  • Alerting

With Yotascale, you can set a budget for any group or division. The ML tools forecast the group’s costs in months, quarters, or years. If the forecast for a group’s costs exceeds the amount set in the budget, Yotascale can alert you so that you can rectify the situation. Thus, you avoid budget overruns, and, for costs with charges depending on use, you can avoid incurring those charges. Apart from that, it also provides recommendations with reasons why to perform them and how saves costs.

Yotascale Contexts

Contexts is a feature unique to Yotascale. By using the organizational hierarchy created with the automated tagging policies you set up, you get complete cost visibility and a context-based analysis at any level you want.

For example, by using the Contexts view, you can get an organizational overview of division development or drill down to the costs of individual teams. Then, you can distribute cost details to the proper teams for action on them. You can provide the cost details in real-time so that when you add or remove resources from your organizational hierarchy, the new costs of the affected units in the hierarchy are automatically calculated.

For more information about Yotascale Contexts, read the Overcoming the Challenges of Kubernetes Cost Allocation and Reporting whitepaper.

Automated Anomaly Detection

When you analyze delivery costs, you can see anomalies in the costs that significantly affect the bill if you don’t address them promptly. For example, you can see that what should be an ordinary delivery, costs much more than usual. An analysis of the anomaly can prevent similar anomalies in the future. Both CloudZero and Yotascale provide automated anomaly detection. Both use machine learning to identify these anomalies.

You can directly integrate both CloudZero and Yotascale’s Anomaly Detection feature with Slack. Both can provide necessary alerts to the proper team or engineer. And, both can include the precise details for the cost of the change so that the engineering team can identify the issue as fast as possible. The advantage of Yotascale is that it provides almost real-time alerts when it detects an anomaly. This gives the team a great head-start, especially when combined with root-cause information. Also, as Yotascale has dedicated budgeting and forecasting tools, it provides forecasted cost anomalies as well.

Conclusion

This article explained why cloud cost management solutions are necessary and can help reduce costs. It compared Yotascale and CloudZero in five categories to provide a detailed competitive analysis of what each platform has to offer.

Both platforms offer similar granularity down to the level of business divisions, services, products, or the environment. Similarly, both support the allocation of Kubernetes costs, and they can monitor the price of the pods, namespaces, and clusters. Yotascale’s ability to get precise data about the instance type gives it an edge. Both tools provide similar automated anomaly detection using machine learning algorithms, and they directly integrate with tools like Slack to send alerts for the slightest deviation from expected behavior.

The real difference between the two comes in when we examine tagging. CloudZero doesn’t enforce tagging policies and naming conventions, whereas Yotascale offers tags automation. This feature adds further granularity to the shared resources level while maintaining healthy practices and policies throughout the organization. Also, Yotascale offers dedicated budgeting and forecasting tools to eliminate cost overage proactively. In CloudZero, you rely on a breakdown to forecast costs.

Both offer similar features, but the unique functionalities of Yotascale provide an edge over CloudZero. Take a close look at Yotascale’s advantage by scheduling a demo.

If you’re interested in developing expert technical content that performs, let’s have a conversation today.

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