North Cloud

My main use case for North Cloud  is to reduce AWS  spend. A quick specific example of how I use North Cloud  to reduce AWS  spend is through discounted EC2  instances.

North Cloud has positively impacted my organization by reducing our AWS bill by 15%. This 15% reduction in my AWS bill has allowed us to increase our runway. I cannot share more about how increasing our runway has affected our business or operations.

I have found the integration very seamless and easy. The best features North Cloud offers are easy onboarding integration and a non-invasive business model.

I find the easy onboarding integration and non-invasive business model to be the best features because we were able to reduce spend on our AWS bill without using any internal employee hours and without worrying about any complicated account changes.

I think North Cloud could be improved with additional savings for more AWS services. I would like to see additional savings for RDS  and data transfer, as that would help my organization.

I have been using North Cloud for two years.

North Cloud is stable.

North Cloud's scalability is great.

The customer support is great.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Deploying North Cloud in my environment was easy. My experience with the configuration process took five minutes. The procurement process was easy.

My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

I have seen a return on investment, but I cannot give you metrics.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was very easy, very fast, and simple.

Before choosing North Cloud, I did not evaluate other options.

North Cloud integrates very well with other AWS services I use. I do not have any thoughts about the metering and billing experience. I would advise others looking into using North Cloud that it is easy to get set up with, so they should give it a shot. I found this interview faster and have no suggestions for change. I gave this review a rating of 5.

We use North Cloud  to identify cost savings that can be applied to our AWS  account.

North Cloud  has been a great partner in helping us navigate cloud cost savings.

The dashboard is really helpful in showing an overview snapshot of how our account is performing and the areas where we can take advantage of additional savings.

We have been using this solution for 8 months.

With our North Cloud account, we can take advantage of cost savings without committing to a contract, which makes it flexible for seasons when usage fluctuates.

The North Cloud team is very helpful and responsive when we have questions, and they do a great job at proactively reaching out to let us know of cost-saving opportunities.

The use case is Cost Management.

North has been an excellent partner in managing our AWS  costs.

North Cloud  procures Compute Savings Plans on our behalf, guided by a dashboard that highlights savings opportunities.

When we have oversubscribed on CSPs in one area, they proactively reach out with suggestions for reallocating those plans where they can do the most good.

North recently added support for database reservations, which would have been next on my wish list.

I look forward to their menu expanding as AWS  adds additional savings vehicles.

I have used the solution for 18 months.

This is our first cost management platform.

Our primary use case for North Cloud  was to take advantage of savings plans discounts from Amazon without being locked into long-term commitments or high upfront costs that would lower our velocity.

North Cloud  was able to get us access to savings plans that cut approximately 20% from our monthly AWS  costs. These savings plans were previously unavailable to us due to commitments that would lock us into specific server types for long periods of time. Due to changing load requirements, those savings plans were not viable for us with long-term commitments.

The most useful features have been the no-commitment savings plans access as well as the optimized environment impact interface. Getting an at-a-glance look at our carbon footprint from our AWS  resources is a good addition to the main goal of the product, which is the no-commitment savings plans.

The only features missing from North Cloud that I believe would be helpful are ones that AWS themselves have yet to offer. For example, more expansive RDS  / Database savings plans offerings. This isn't a limitation on the North side, as they were able to rapidly add support for the existing database savings plans offerings when they launched, but more of an AWS limitation.

We have been using the solution for 4 months.

We did not use a previous software tool for this functionality.

Leverage your AWS rep and convey to the North Team where your business is regarding stage and total engineering cost. They (North) will assist in making the plans work for your organization.

We evaluated a few other options, but their pricing structure and contract timings were not compatible with our organization.

The team is extremely helpful and communicative. Immediately upon working with them, they set up a Slack connect channel and give you a live line of communication with someone in their engineering team, sales team, and support team. Some organizations do this but then just mute the channel and ignore it. North Cloud is extremely reactive to any messages sent to this channel and even reaches out directly on Slack if something goes wrong with the savings plan, new features are launched, and to check how things are going. These are not worded or set up to sound like sales pitches but more like the organization and its individuals actually care about making sure you are being successful with their tool.

My main use case for North Cloud  is that it really helps us with being a very lean team, being able to keep a handle and keep control of cost savings and make sure that we're leveraging those nice AWS  cost savings related to compute savings plans, without us having to devote very valuable, actual hands-on-keyboard resource time to do all that.

North Cloud  has positively impacted our organization with our MVP rollout; we're already seeing 10% shaved off of our monthly AWS  bill, just by a few really quick and easy actions in North Cloud. It was really fast to get that set up, and it's really easy to verify it's in place. We don't have to worry about constantly revisiting a cost savings plan because we can see all that from North Cloud's dashboard, and we can trust that that is being handled well by them.

My team saves an immense amount of engineering time by not having to manually check cost savings plans or track spend; we're talking anywhere from maybe 10 hours a week that is just saved right there from not having to worry about that. It's huge for us as a lean team; North Cloud is super valuable in just allowing us to focus on where we add the most value to our organization and not have to worry about operational overhead such as cost savings plans.

North Cloud has changed the way we forecast or budget our AWS spending, and I feel more confident in our cloud financial planning now because we feel both more confident about future forecasting and also confident that we're allocating dollars where they should go. We can also find if dollars are allocated somewhere they shouldn't go, thanks to North Cloud.

The best features North Cloud offers include cost savings automation and handling all that, making it really great to have a cost savings expert in your corner when dealing with this. Even more than that, the dashboard they provide is an excellent resource for just getting bearings of spend across AWS accounts and across AWS services that sometimes can be difficult to extract with something such as Cost Explorer in AWS. We have actually found ourselves using North Cloud almost as much, if not more so, than Cost Explorer to review where cost is being accrued.

The dashboard in North Cloud is especially helpful because the drill-down into spend over time is a lot more intuitive. It can be kind of difficult in AWS; there's a 14-day window on resource-based dimension scoping for Cost Explorer graphs. There have been historic limitations, and with North Cloud, it's a lot easier to get those resource-level, deep-dive metrics. For example, if I need to see breakdowns of per-Lambda function, which Lambda functions are accruing the most spend, I can do that in Cost Explorer, but in North Cloud, it just feels a lot more intuitive and easier to get that data.

The way we use North Cloud in our workflow is we'll review the dashboard, which has a lot of really good insights into our total AWS spend for our linked accounts, but then also cost savings opportunities that North Cloud can support. We go through the dashboard, and to actually set up the savings plans is really simple. There could be some cases where maybe a cost spike pops up out of nowhere, and we actually want to address it; North Cloud's really good for that, too. I believe they also have an auto feature that lets them actually do all the cost savings automatically, but we like to have that just last verification check on our end to review cost savings.

I'm not really sure how North Cloud can be improved, but if I had to pick something, maybe some integrations with Slack or something, because it can be a bit difficult to jump around different panels. Working with a very lean team, we have to jump into multiple panels for logging, cloud, patching, and things like that. More integrations for a single-pane-of-glass-type plug-in for existing channels would be nice.

I don't think the improvements I mentioned would factor into my decision to not go with North Cloud; it would just be something where, if this was in place, it would be easier for me and my team to more proactively adopt the platform. It's already really easy to adopt, and it's very low-friction to get it all set up; we would just prefer to plug this into our existing monitoring channels.

I've been using North Cloud for about six to eight months now.

North Cloud seems pretty scalable; I haven't noticed any issues with downtime or not being able to access cost savings plans or anything. It's pretty stable.

I would rate the customer support from North Cloud a 10; they have very active support and it's very easy to talk to someone when something needs to be looked at or some question arises.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution before choosing North Cloud.

It was very easy to deploy North Cloud in my environment; extremely easy.

My experience with the configuration process was that it was well-documented, supporting a variety of different deployment and configuration approaches such as Terraform  and CloudFormation . I think there were even a couple of others, maybe such as a Chef  playbook. I really appreciate how they offered multiple different approaches, and everything was automated, making it a lot easier to configure and deploy North Cloud.

Based on their unique billing approach of the percentage-of-money-saved-for-us billing approach, we saw an immediate ROI because it didn't take a whole lot of effort or engineering time to set it up. It was pretty straightforward and low friction, and we were able to see an immediate return pretty quickly.

My experience with the procurement process was very easy, from getting compliance-related documents to satisfy our own compliance requirements for vendor onboarding, to explanation of the pricing and the pricing itself, to just the sales team, their support, and active communication throughout the process. The experience was very good.

My thoughts about the metering and billing experience are that it was very straightforward; it was a big plus that it's not a fixed cost but based on how much they save you. I really appreciate that skin-in-the-game commitment of if they don't save you money, you don't have to really spend money. The more we save, the more they make, which shows a bigger incentive to save us more money, and we love that.

My advice to others looking into using North Cloud is that it's worth the shot because it's really easy to set up, and the billing is very agreeable. It's very low commitment, and with everything I've seen with North Cloud, it can only go good, so I would say dive in. I gave North Cloud an overall rating of 5 out of 5 stars.