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.