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How cloudtamer.io Complements AWS: Billing and Cost Management

complementing aws with cloudtamer.io

We often get questions about how cloudtamer.io compares to or differs from capabilities provided by public cloud providers. In this blog series, we're looking at how cloudtamer.io complements and extends native AWS functionality.

In the final post in our series, we're focusing on the budget enforcement pillar. Here's how we complement and extend native AWS functionality for billing and cost management.

Catch up with the first and second posts in the series on setup and provisioning and account management and permissions.

AWS Billing and Cost Management

Working With

AWS Billing and Cost Management is used to pay AWS bills, monitor usage, and budget costs.

cloudtamer.io uses AWS Billing and Cost Management as a source of truth upon which to base additional features.

Building On

cloudtamer.io helps you achieve cost visibility, remain within budget, and estimate future costs by:

  • Making it easy for finance teams to gain visibility into cloud spending across multiple accounts through an
    easy-to-use interface.
  • Supplementing the AWS-reported billing data provided every 12 hours with near-real-time cost estimates for top AWS services for an up-to-date view of current spend.
  • Triggering budget enforcement actions when different levels of thresholds are reached, slowing or stopping spending from occurring on sandbox or production accounts to enforce budgets of all size.

This concludes our series on how we complement various AWS services.

If you'd like the complete series in one easy-to-download PDF, here is Complementing AWS Governance at Scale with cloudtamer.io.

Marianna leads marketing at cloudtamer.io.

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How cloudtamer.io Complements AWS: Account Management and Permissions

complementing aws with cloudtamer.io

We often get questions about how cloudtamer.io compares to or differs from capabilities provided by public cloud providers. In this blog series, we're looking at how cloudtamer.io complements and extends native AWS functionality.

In our second post, we're covering account management and permission functionality, including AWS Organizations, AWS Identify and Access Management, and AWS Service Control Policies.

If you missed our first post, catch up here with setup and provisioning.

AWS Organizations

Working With

AWS Organizations helps to group accounts together and apply policies to restrict AWS services based on the grouping.

In commercial AWS regions, cloudtamer.io leverages AWS Organizations to programmatically create new AWS accounts.

Building On

cloudtamer.io helps you reduce manual labor, scale growth, and see value by:

  • Providing an easy-to-use, hierarchical account management interface across commercial and GovCloud regions that matches your familiar and unique 
    organizational model.
  • Augmenting AWS Organizations’ support for Service Control Policies with support for IAM policies – all
    bundled within cloudtamer.io Cloud Rules for easy inheritance across the hierarchy.
  • Supporting multiple payer accounts, allowing companies or resellers with multiple groups paying monthly invoices to get a single view of their cloud presence.

AWS Identify and Access Management (IAM) and Service Control Policies (SCPs)

Working With

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables customers to create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny
their access to AWS resources.

AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs) determine what services and actions can be delegated by administrators to the users and roles in accounts. SCPs do not grant any permissions.

cloudtamer.io Cloud Rules bundle multiple AWS services, including IAM policies, into a single entity for ease of use. SCPs can be used to restrict services that cannot be used by even administrators, while cloudtamer.io manages permissions at specific role levels across one or more accounts.

Building On

cloudtamer.io reduces manual labor and minimizes risk and errors by:

  • Providing customer-specific hierarchical management and application of IAM policies using a tree structure, while keeping policies in sync across your organization.
  • Simplifying end user access by federating authenticated users into IAM roles, reducing the number of IAM user accounts required.
  • Restricting services and configurations at a granular
    level based on specific conditions such as only using specific AWS regions to satisfy compliance standards.
  • Providing a way to request exemptions against policies so only specific roles can gain access to services.

In the final post in our series, we’ll look at how cloudtamer.io complements AWS native capabilities around billing and cost management.

Marianna leads marketing at cloudtamer.io.

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How cloudtamer.io Complements AWS: Setup and Provisioning

complementing aws with cloudtamer.io

We often get questions about how cloudtamer.io compares to or differs from capabilities provided by public cloud providers. So, over the next few posts, we'll look at how cloudtamer.io complements and extends native AWS functionality.

cloudtamer.io delivers on the three pillars of governance - account management, budget enforcement, and compliance automation - to meet the requirements outlined within the AWS Governance at Scale framework.

Let's kick off by sharing how cloudtamer.io complements and extends AWS functionality around setup and provisioning. Specifically, we'll look at AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Machine Images, AWS Service Catalog, AWS Landing Zones, and AWS Control Tower.

AWS CloudFormation

Working With

AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning of AWS resources through templates for quick and reliable setup of services or applications.

cloudtamer.io Cloud Rules bundle multiple AWS services, including AWS CloudFormation, into a single object for ease of use.

Building On

cloudtamer.io reduces manual labor and minimizes risk and errors by:

  • Consistently applying AWS CloudFormation templates across AWS accounts based on where the accounts live within your organizational hierarchy.
  • Simplifying the update of AWS CloudFormation stacks in AWS regions where StackSets are not available.
  • Helping non-technical security and financial stakeholders to implement template libraries and manage their responsibilities within the cloud.

AMIs and AWS Service Catalog

Working With

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) provide the operating system and software configurations required to launch a computing instance in the cloud.

AWS Service Catalog enables organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS.

cloudtamer.io Cloud Rules bundle multiple AWS services, including AMIs and Service Catalog portfolios, into a single entity for ease of use.

Building On

cloudtamer.io reduces manual labor and minimizes risk and errors by:

  • Including AMIs and Service Catalog portfolios in cloudtamer.io Cloud Rules to allow you to easily share, update, and deploy approved instance and product configurations with AWS accounts within specific parts of your organization.

AWS Landing Zones and AWS Control Tower

Working With

AWS Landing Zones provides a framework of core accounts to provide shared services, logging, and security to new accounts automatically.

AWS Control Tower automates the set-up of a baseline environment, or landing zone.

Landing Zones are a starting point to build around; cloudtamer.io takes this starting point and uses this to scale up and across an organization.

Building On

cloudtamer.io helps you scale growth and remain within budget by:

  • Importing existing accounts for initial and ongoing governance and aligning these accounts to your organizational hierarchy via a visual, non-technical interface.
  • Encouraging delegation through roles and responsibilities to minimize the size and labor of a centralized cloud team.
  • Providing financial enforcement capabilities to ensure users remain within budget.
  • Enhancing Single Sign On (SSO) into AWS accounts to provide greater context into spending and policies applied.

That’s it! Next up, we’ll look at how cloudtamer.io complements AWS native capabilities around account management and permissions.

Marianna leads marketing at cloudtamer.io.