Cloud-Insider is a cloud cost optimizer solution that we offer to our customers. It helps customers to reduce their cloud spend. Today an average small business spends minimum of $15000 to $20000 to develop, test and host their solutions with the cloud service provider like AWS or Azure or GCP every month. Out of the total spend, on an average 20% of the spend can be cut by taking different actions like stopping, terminating or by downgrading the instance size. The Cloud-Insider helps customers to do multiple actions to save costs. It allows customers to run predefined rules to shutdown instances during the weekend, non-business hours and start when these periods end. The customers can also define a bunch of self-defined rules. The solution provides a framework on top of which you can create rules and these rules will be executed on-demand or on a fixed schedule.

60-second scan to cut your cloud spend by 20+ %

It takes a few steps to run a scan and identify your spending and optimization. Please follow the below steps.

Our offering is available in AWS Marketplace. You can buy our solution either from AWS Marketplace or contact through our sales if you want to do a yearly contract.

Prerequisite:

The first step is to trust an AWS account and define a role with certain policies. Follow the below steps.

1 - Login into your AWS account and go to the IAM service.

2 - Go to roles and create a role.

3 - There will be few options as shown in the below image.

4 - Select the "Another AWS Account"

4 - Enter the following account "726941830068" in the "Account ID" field. This is the account you will be trusting and the role you create in the next step will be assumed by this account.

5 - Provide an external ID. In our example, we are going to use "ci-cost-saver". Below is a snapshot of the sample configuration

6 - In the next step, you will create a policy.

7 - Search for the "cost explorer" as shown below. Select the policy as shown below

 Now again search for "ec2fullaccess". You will get an “AWSEC2fullaccess” policy. Select it and go to the next step. You can also add Ec2ReadOnly access in this policy instead of EC2 Full access. If you provide only read-only access we will not be able to take actions like stop, terminate on the instances.

8 - You can skip tags (it is optional) and you will be taken to a place where you will be requested to specify the role name. In this example, we have created the role name as "cloud-insider-cost-analyzer" and have provided the description.

Once the above prereq is completed now we can get into action.

Go to https://cloudinsider.io/ci and click on signup. This will take you to the AWS Market place.

In the marketplace subscribe to our offering. You will be provided with three plans.

Basic: 

• The user can Build Dashboard based on different criteria like AWS service, By
                The region, Based on Tags and much more
• Different reports can be scheduled to provide visibility to targeted users.
• One can scan to identify all your underutilized and orphaned resources to reduce cloud spend.

Standard: - In addition to the above all available in basic the user can also take several actions like,

                - Stop the instances during Weekend and start them during weekdays

                - Stop the instances during non-business hrs and start them during business hrs

                - Downsize the instances based on utilization

                - Create your own rules from a predefined set of rules

Enterprise - All of the features available in Basic and Standard. In addition to the above, you will have get a dedicated setup

Below is a snapshot of different offerings.

Once you select the type of service please subscribe to the contract. This will redirect back to the signup page. Please provide your information as shown below. Select the service type as the same contract you choose in the AWS MarketPlace. Snapshot showed below:

This will complete the signup on the Cloud Insider and take you the login page. Log in using the username and password you created in the previous step. This will take you to the configuration page as shown below.

Provide your AWS account name. This can be any name. This is the account where you created the role and the one want to track and reduce your cloud spend.

Enter your AWS account ID ( This can be found when you login into AWS Console and in the top right corner select your account name and MY account ID to see your account ID)

Amazon External ID you created in the prerequisite step.

Role name that you created in the prerequisite step.

Once you complete the step you will be able to see the Dashboard and your possible savings. Please look at the below snapshots:

Spend Summary Dashboard

Possible Savings