I mainly use CoreStack for FinOps and cloud governance. It is primarily used by FinOps, cloud governance, and platform teams.

We integrated CoreStack with our AWS accounts and configured policies for cost, tagging, and resource usage, which helps us ensure governance is applied consistently across all environments. The dashboards are used for spend tracking, policies, flagging non-compliant resources, and optimization insights that we review regularly.

Governance policies and cost models are aligned with our organizational structure, and with CoreStack's help, we apply them consistently across our different accounts. Different IAM roles and billing APIs are used, which CoreStack integrates, helping us gain deep visibility into the usage and cost of each account that is integrated.

For dashboards, we extensively use CoreStack for spend tracking, policies, flagging non-compliant resources, and providing optimization insights and cost-saving insights, which we review regularly for our different customers.

In terms of the best features, I really appreciate the FinOps and governance parts of CoreStack. We can have it consistently applied across multiple accounts, and it is agnostic as well, which means we do not face any challenges integrating with our multiple accounts across the globe.

CoreStack has definitely improved compliance in our organization, and it has helped customers optimize their cost spends by flagging idle and unused resources in their accounts, which has really benefited them and us.

I believe CoreStack already has very good features in the governance and security parts, but stability can definitely be improved. There are areas in CoreStack that can be improved.

We have been using CoreStack for around one to two years.

In terms of stability, CoreStack is definitely stable in our experience.

CoreStack scales well as the number of accounts and resources increases, and we are already using multi-account cloud environments without facing any issues.

We did interact with the customer support team from CoreStack, and I found it good. I would rate the customer support from CoreStack a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used CoreStack directly, though we evaluated other cloud cost tools such as CloudHealth and other FinOps platforms. CoreStack offered us stronger governance controls and more actionable insights, which is why we chose it.

Mainly through improved cost visibility and optimization with CoreStack, we have achieved a good ROI. For some customers, we were able to achieve more than forty percent cost savings by identifying unused and idle resources in their accounts, leading to significant cost savings after we completed the cleanup of those resources.

The time saved with CoreStack is proportional to money saved, since we are getting automated reports, all the governance, and cost visibility without spending much effort manually identifying unused resources and enforcing the required cost controls. This has significantly reduced our unnecessary spend in the account, which is in turn an ROI for us.

In terms of pricing and setup cost, CoreStack aligns well with enterprise standards, so there are no issues with that. The value is as per the enterprise cloud governance platforms, which we definitely realize when managing large, complex cloud environments.

We evaluated CloudHealth and other FinOps platforms before deciding on CoreStack.

CoreStack works best when paired with a clear FinOps and governance strategy, so you should definitely consider that. CoreStack is a strong choice for organizations serious about FinOps and cloud governance, and it is indeed a good SaaS platform. CoreStack delivers strong results in our organization. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

My main use case for CoreStack is cloud cost governance and FinOps maturity.

We are using CoreStack for our operations team and we have multiple cloud customers from different hyperscalers. For a specific use case, there is a customer who is using their AWS, Azure, and GCP environment. With this particular tool, we offered them a consolidated overview of CloudOps and FinOps and where they can save cost. We have reduced their cloud spend by 20% with the cost governance and FinOps options available in CoreStack.

Currently, we are using CoreStack for cost governance and FinOps only, but we are trying to integrate Ops Automation and SecOps offerings from CoreStack.

At this time, we are widely using CoreStack for cloud cost governance and FinOps level. We have observed that it gives better visibility into how we can get the visibility of our stale resources in our accounts. For example, from AWS, it provides visibility on EBS volumes that are not being used, and it gives recommendations to delete them and save some cost. It also offers visibility on how we can proceed with the RI commitment and savings plan commitment to save some cost as well.

We are using both stale resource detection and RI and savings plan recommendations because we are sharing a regular monthly report from CoreStack to our customers. These two are the main features where we give visibility to the customer on whether there are some resources that are not being used, such as Elastic IPs and EBS, and how we can save cost by committing on compute. This is our regular monthly governance report add-on from CoreStack.

CoreStack has positively impacted our organization by increasing our customer satisfaction.

At this time, we are exploring other options from CoreStack, but I do not think any specific improvements are needed. However, adding features to automate tasks at the operations level could help provide better visibility across the cloud for our operational engineers. I believe the multi-tenancy feature is present, but if it could be improved and secured further, that could be beneficial. If a particular admin user is accessing a multi-tenant environment, there should be user-specific permissions included.

I am currently exploring improvements, but I am certain that if I find something in the future, I will provide that feedback.

I have observed multi-tenancy and user-specific issues, as sometimes customers ask for visibility of the CoreStack dashboard. We have onboarded around 50 customers on CoreStack, and this visibility is essential.

I have been using CoreStack for around three years.

Retention is a key measure for us because some customers were worried about their increasing cloud costs and cloud spend. They raised concerns about needing to change our partner due to a lack of visibility in cost optimization. We suggested they proceed with CoreStack, and after onboarding it to our offering, within three months, we received positive feedback from customers that we were able to reduce some of their costs. We added reports from CoreStack to our monthly governance and scheduled reports to the customers, which helped us retain some of our key value customers.

We are exploring SecOps and automation features going forward with our operations team so that with a single dashboard we can automate our operational tasks from two different hyperscalers. With CoreStack, we can perform our day-to-day activities without logging into the system.

I advise others looking into using CoreStack to consider it for better cost governance across hyperscalers, for maturing their FinOps offering to customers, and for having a single tool that can assist with SecOps, CloudOps, FinOps, and cost governance. I believe CoreStack is the best tool.

Currently, I think CoreStack is the best FinOps tool available in the market, which is why we are using it. I will come back and update my reviews if I find anything for improvement.

I am giving this review a rating of 8.

Positive

My main use case for CoreStack involves using FinOps services primarily for cost optimization for our end customer AWS workload usage.

A specific example of how I use CoreStack for cost optimization is that we monitor CoreStack reports. When CoreStack generates a report to optimize the workload while purchasing cost compute saving options, it can potentially save our customer cost.

The best features CoreStack offers are primarily the recommendations for cost optimization for RDS and EC2 machines.

I have found the recommendations for cost optimization to be accurate and actionable for RDS and EC2 machines. We received multiple recommendations from CoreStack over time that potentially generate cost savings to the workload running in AWS.

CoreStack has positively impacted my organization through the recommendations it provides for cost optimization. It generally tracks on a 30-day basis, and I expect it to generate reports on at least a half-yearly or quarterly basis.

I can suggest improvements for CoreStack, especially regarding reporting periods. I noticed that some of the cost optimization reports generated potential savings while considering systems that have only maximum utilization of 1% or 2%. The recommendations made in CoreStack to delete a machine have the potential to generate major cost savings, but such machines should not be listed for deletion if they have maximum CPU utilization of 1%.

I have concerns about needed improvements primarily regarding AWS. If a customer is running ten virtual machines and one machine has a maximum of 1% utilization, it is considered as an idle instance in the report, which completely ignores that particular machine. This should not be the approach.

I have been using CoreStack for almost four years.

CoreStack is stable.

CoreStack's scalability is optimal since it does not require scalability to be very precise, given that it is a SaaS service. It generates and captures metrics of your workload, which meets our requirements all the time and is always available from the service perspective.

I have interacted with CoreStack's customer support, and we managed to obtain a technical demo from their team for my team from time to time.

Negative

Before CoreStack, I used Akila. The reason for switching from Akila was that we were using it for billing services, and we were looking for a FinOps tool, which CoreStack managed to provide with competency in FinOps services. That is one of the reasons we moved from Akila to CoreStack.

Since implementing CoreStack, the outcomes and metrics we have seen include quick implementation since it only requires the association of AWS workload accounts. I do not see any challenge with the integration of CoreStack.

We are a partner with CoreStack and did not purchase it through the AWS Marketplace.

I have seen a return on investment with CoreStack. It generates value addition on top of the Trusted Advisor report, which saves major effort for our resources. It is absolutely a value addition while looking at bringing down the cost of a workload.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is straightforward and has flexible pricing based on workload consumption. I am satisfied with the cost model.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing CoreStack, although we used others such as Akila before.

I would like to add that CoreStack should cover other hyperscalers as well.

I rate CoreStack 9 out of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. I chose 9 out of 10 because of the few missing features that I am looking for that are not available.

My advice for others looking into using CoreStack is that anyone who is looking to optimize their workload cost for public cloud services should start using CoreStack because of the reports and granularity it produces to optimize cost, which will benefit them.

Overall, I am satisfied with CoreStack. I feel that it is doing phenomenal work. However, it should improve by producing more value addition in its services and offering more granularity toward the reports as outcomes for cost optimization, including bringing in more artifacts toward those reports.