cloudtamer.io supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure. Support for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is planned for 2020. If you'd like to be notified when cloudtamer.io supports GCP, please contact us.

cloudtamer.io is deployed into an Amazon Web Services account; it is not a SaaS offering. cloudtamer.io runs on a load-balanced series of EC2 instances with an RDS Aurora backend and leverages a variety of cloud-native services including CloudFormation, KMS, IAM, Service Catalog, and CloudWatch. You deploy in your own VPC with two provided CloudFormation templates. One CloudFormation template sets up the database and the other template sets up the application.

cloudtamer.io is not a SaaS product. Our solution is installed in your environment, specifically in one of your AWS accounts. We took this approach because we understand that many organizations do not want to share their cloud workloads and data with third parties.

cloudtamer.io provides native access to the cloud service provider (CSP) consoles and APIs by federating users into the native accounts. With a cloud broker, you must wait for the cloud broker to support any new features and APIs before they're available to you. In addition, with a cloud broker, you must learn another technology and interface to use the cloud resources.

Cloud reporting tools help you analyze and visualize your usage data to review trends and identify potential cost savings. While cloudtamer.io provides some cost-based reporting, its goal is to provide budget enforcement and management to help you plan, track, and control cloud access based on current spending. cloudtamer.io delivers cost transparency, management, and enforcement.

Conceptually both cloudtamer.io and AWS Organizations provide mechanisms to hierarchically manage a set of AWS accounts. Here are the substantive differences in capabilities between the two offerings:

• cloudtamer.io supports multiple payer accounts. AWS Organizations support only one payer account. This means companies or resellers that have multiple groups paying AWS monthly invoices can't use AWS organizations to get a single view of their cloud presence.
• cloudtamer.io supports hierarchical applications of Cloud Rules (a combination of IAM policies, CloudFormation templates [CFTs], Terraform scripts, and additional scripts and executables). AWS Organizations only support service control policies (SCPs), which are limited in features compared to IAM policies. SCPs are all-or-nothing: you can't granularly restrict AWS services and configurations based on specific conditions such as only using AWS regions in a specific geographic area.
• cloudtamer.io supports approved exceptions to Cloud Rules. AWS Organization SCPs cannot be overridden.
• cloudtamer.io includes budget enforcement features. AWS Organizations only aggregate costs.
• cloudtamer.io provides continuous cost estimates. AWS Organizations provide cost estimates every 12 hours, and the data in these reports may be up to 24 hours old.
• cloudtamer.io supports an arbitrary depth of Organization Units in a hierarchy. AWS Organizations only support a depth of five Organization Units.

Consider the costs associated with manually governing your cloud. Based on customer experience, we’ve typically seen 1-2 full-time personnel needed to manually perform each of the following activities: building and managing user and group structures, monitoring accounts, and managing and enforcing policies. In addition, if you neglect governance, there are the costs associated with budget overruns and policy violations. cloudtamer.io helps to minimize labor costs associated with cloud governance and the costs of zero governance.

cloudtamer.io licensing has two parts: 1) an annual base subscription fee, and 2) a percentage of the cloud service provider (CSP) usage that cloudtamer.io manages. You can have an unlimited number of cloudtamer.io user accounts and CSP accounts. Usage units allow you to buy licenses based on your anticipated cloud spend during budget planning periods. CSP usage units do not expire provided you maintain an active subscription for the instance where the CSP usage unit is applied. If your CSP spending exceeds the value of the usage units required, cloudtamer.io will enter a degraded state of operation. Review our license agreement.

You can have an unlimited number of cloudtamer.io user accounts and cloud service provider accounts or subscriptions.

Please contact us for a quote or to discuss enterprise licensing options.

cloudtamer.io is designed as a cloud-native application that can scale both horizontally and vertically on AWS based on your requirements. The cost to run cloudtamer.io in your AWS account can vary depending on your organization's performance and security requirements. In addition, the total number of AWS accounts connected and the amount of spending data managed by the cloudtamer.io instance also effects the size of the deployment. The average monthly AWS cost to run cloudtamer.io in commercial US AWS regions starts as low as $300. Contact us for a more detailed estimate based on your organization's requirements.

cloudtamer.io is in the AWS Marketplace. Listing in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace is planned for 2020.

cloudtamer.io can manage AWS GovCloud (US) accounts and can run within the AWS GovCloud (US) region. All AWS services that cloudtamer.io requires are available within the GovCloud region.

cloudtamer.io supports the AWS S-C2S and C2S regions.

cloudtamer.io can be configured to authenticate to active directory (AD) by adding an identity provider to the cloudtamer.io system. You must provide some basic information (such as the service account that can be used to query the AD LDAP database for users and groups) to pre-populate the cloudtamer.io system.

Via APIs and webhooks, cloudtamer.io can be extended to integrate with other services and applications within your environment.

cloudtamer.io currently integrates with the following multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions: Google Authenticator, Yubikey tokens, and PKI-based smart cards. Additional MFA support can be added through a professional services engagement.

No, cloudtamer.io does not depend on AWS Organizations for its account management, budget enforcement, and compliance automation features. In commercial AWS regions, cloudtamer.io can leverage the AWS Organizations service to programmatically create AWS accounts. In isolated regions and other environments where access to AWS Organizations is not available, cloudtamer.io provides customers with a cache of pre-created accounts that can be used when required.

cloudtamer.io provides a robust, policy-based inheritance of organizationally defined compliance policies. cloudtamer.io gives you the ability to manage policies and cloud templates that can be used to enforce security standards. You can upload your own policies and templates into the cloudtamer.io library to ensure accounts are established in an approved manner and users are only permitted to use the services and configurations allowed within your organization. cloudtamer.io does not provide a predefined set of policies to meet specific compliance regulations like HIPAA, FedRAMP and PCI but, rather, a starting point toward further customization to ensure alignment with your risk profile.

cloudtamer.io gathers billing data on fixed intervals from cloud provider-generated billing reports. Because the data contained within these reports may be up to 24 hours old, we also calculate the current costs for selected services in near real-time to allow customers to have a more accurate view of their current cloud spending and to enable cloudtamer.io to take action when spending exceeds the thresholds defined on each project.

cloudtamer.io runs on a load-balanced series of EC2 instances. The AWS services required to install cloudtamer.io are:

• EC2
• S3
• IAM
• KMS
• VPC
• RDS (Aurora MySQL)
• CloudFormation
• CloudWatch
• Billing (Monthly Reports and Cost and Usage Reports)

Basic email support (2-business-day response time), software updates, and access to our support portal and community forums are provided during the license term.

Premium Support can be purchased on an annual basis and provides you with phone support (4-hour response time from 9AM to 4PM, Monday through Friday, except for U.S. Federal Holidays) and an assigned Technical Account Manager to assist with answering questions and troubleshooting issues. Premium Support contracts are purchased on an annual basis based on the total license amount purchased.

We have onboarding packages available as a fixed-price service to assist with your installation and setup of cloudtamer.io. In addition, we offer professional services to help with design, implementation, configuration, testing, training, troubleshooting, and support of cloudtamer.io. Review our license agreement.

Help documentation is available from directly within the cloudtamer.io application. In addition, customers who have purchased a license can access our support center to submit a question and search our knowledge base.

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