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September 24, 2025
September 24, 2024
September 24, 2025
September 24, 2024
Cloud management platforms in 2025 must go beyond mere visibility and alerts. The most effective tools should automate real-time actions, optimizing costs and performance without manual intervention. As cloud environments grow in complexity, platforms that proactively manage resources, rightsize workloads, and reduce inefficiencies will be crucial. By automating cloud operations, engineering teams can focus on higher-value work while maintaining performance and cost control. A true Cloud management platform should close the loop between insight and action, delivering smarter, more efficient cloud management.
Over the past decade, cloud adoption has shifted from an early‑adopter experiment to a mainstream requirement. Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach by 2027, and 92% are already using multi-cloud environments.
However, this flexibility comes with rising costs and complexity. A FinOps in Focus 2025 study estimates that 21% of cloud infrastructure spending, around US$44.5 billion in 2025, is wasted on underutilized resources.
As an engineering leader, you need more than just dashboards. You need tools that simplify operations, optimize costs, and give you better visibility across your cloud environments.
That’s why we have created this buyer’s guide to help you compare top platforms across key areas, cost management, multi-cloud and hybrid management, observability, automation, and security, so you can make the right decisions for your team.
A cloud management platform (CMP) is a software suite that sits above the underlying cloud services. Its goal is to give teams a unified way to provision, configure, monitor, and optimize resources across public clouds, on‑premises infrastructure, and container platforms.
CMPs typically offer:
Now, here’s the reality we’ve seen after years of living in this space: CMPs are great at showing you what’s happening. They’re less great at doing anything about it. Most platforms stop at visibility, leaving teams to chase after alerts and manually implement changes. That gap between insight and action is exactly where costs spiral out of control.
When we discuss cloud management platforms (CMPs) with engineering leaders, one of the first questions that arises is whether to opt for a cloud-native tool or a third-party, cloud-agnostic solution. The difference sounds simple, but it has a direct impact on how much control you keep and how much complexity you invite into your stack.
If 80% of your workloads are in AWS, don’t waste time chasing cloud-agnostic tools. Cloud-native platforms will offer deep integration and streamlined performance for your AWS environment, making them the more efficient choice.
But if you’re supporting AI workloads split across multiple providers, you’ll regret going all-in with a single vendor. In this case, a third-party cloud-agnostic platform becomes essential. It offers the flexibility to manage workloads across different cloud environments, optimizing cost, security, and performance.
For startups or small businesses that are heavily invested in a single cloud provider, a cloud-native solution is often sufficient. However, for larger enterprises or those in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, a third-party platform will provide more flexibility and centralized control.
As engineering leaders, you’re likely familiar with the growing complexities of managing cloud environments. Without proper tools and processes, cloud environments become expensive and difficult to govern. Cloud management platforms address several pressing challenges:
Here’s how engineering teams can benefit from CMPs in light of current cloud trends:
According to Forbes, 32% of cloud spend is unused, and KPMG reports that enterprises overspend by 35%, which is a nice way of saying “your cloud bill is more bloated than it needs to be.”
We’ve seen teams lose months because developers spun up shadow environments that weren’t tagged. Finance called it waste, engineers called it experimentation. CMPs done right prevent that clash.
With automatic tagging and visibility, CMPs ensure that every environment, whether active or experimental, is tracked properly and tied to the right cost center.
According to Gartner, 69% of IT leaders report budget overruns, and this is not just a line on a report. It’s SREs being dragged into meetings, trying to explain why a VM costs more than it should, while the finance team throws their hands up. It's the age-old finger-pointing between engineering and finance, and it gets old real quick.
CMPs address this by providing real-time insights into your usage and budget. With automated cost management and forecasting tools, CMPs act as the “alarm system” to keep budgets from completely derailing.
Despite the overspend, cloud spending continues to rise. 68% of organizations plan to increase their cloud budgets in 2024, driven by the need to support generative AI workloads and other critical services. However, this rising cost comes with a catch: it’s easy for overspending to go unnoticed until the bills arrive.
CMPs ensure that, as cloud budgets rise, they are aligned with business value. By tracking the ROI of cloud expenditures and providing real-time insights, CMPs help engineering teams optimize spend and ensure it aligns with business objectives.
We’ve seen organizations so deep in multi-cloud that they can’t even remember which resources are running on what provider. AWS, GCP, Azure, everything’s different, and managing them separately is a nightmare. And that’s the issue with a lot of multi-cloud setups: you end up with new challenges around cloud sprawl, duplicate services, accountability, cost trade-offs, and security enforcement as KPMG’s 2024 report points out.
CMPs break down those silos, offering centralized control and cross-cloud visibility. This gives your teams a clear picture of what’s running where, with cost allocation and security policies enforced across the board.
As the FinOps Foundation notes, 63% of FinOps practitioners are now managing AI spend. But the problem is you can't rely on spreadsheets to do FinOps for you. Imagine having to manually track every service, every team, every spend unit across a mix of public clouds and private infrastructure. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
CMPs streamline this process by integrating cost allocation, forecasting, and budgeting directly into your cloud management. With automated savings actions and granular tracking, CMPs put cloud cost management on autopilot.
Even if your team isn’t overspending, poor cloud governance can still lead to major headaches. Misconfigured resources, rogue services, and uncontrolled access are just waiting to cause a mess. We’ve seen companies scramble after an audit because they didn’t have proper compliance tracking in place.
CMPs enforce governance policies automatically , whether it’s tagging resources for billing, ensuring compliance with security frameworks, or even managing identity access. The best CMPs handle this in the background, without you needing to keep a constant eye on it.
Engineering teams are under pressure to deliver faster while maintaining high reliability and uptime. CMPs centralize monitoring and automate performance checks, ensuring that teams can meet Service Level Objectives (SLOs) without getting bogged down in manual tasks.
The truth is, CMPs are essential, but most usually stop at visibility. They’ll happily tell you that you’re wasting 35% of your spend, but the hard work of fixing it still falls back on your engineers. In 2025, that’s no longer good enough.
With AI workloads, multi-cloud sprawl, and nonstop cost pressure, the baseline expectation isn’t knowing there’s a problem; it’s solving it before it drains your budget or slows your release cycle. That’s why the next big question isn’t “Do you need a CMP?” (you absolutely do), but rather “Which CMP actually helps you move faster while keeping spend under control?”
With AI-powered automation and real-time scaling becoming standard, choosing the right cloud management platform is key for your team to stay ahead of the curve.
Here’s a roundup of top platforms, categorized by their core strengths. This gives you a solid starting point to evaluate the best fit for your needs.
At Sedai, we created our platform to solve the very problems our founders, two platform engineers, experienced firsthand with traditional cloud management tools. These tools often leave teams with dashboards and alerts, but little proactive capability to act in real-time as cloud environments evolve at rapid speeds.
Sedai works differently:
For enterprises, this means:
Why Sedai Stands Out
Unlike most platforms that stop at visibility or orchestration, Sedai's self-driving cloud closes the loop, ensuring your cloud is not only optimized but also secure, regulations-compliant, and cost-effective.
These Tools focus on budgeting, forecasting, rightsizing, commitment management, anomaly detection, and chargeback/showback. These platforms typically integrate with billing APIs and provide detailed spending reports. Many incorporate machine learning to suggest or implement optimizations.
CloudZero provides detailed visibility into cloud spend, breaking down costs by service, team, and feature. Its platform allows teams to align spending with unit metrics (e.g., cost per customer) and provides actionable recommendations for rightsizing.
FinOut is a comprehensive cloud cost management solution that empowers FinOps, DevOps, and Finance teams to effectively manage and reduce cloud spend while improving profitability without requiring code changes or modifying existing tags. The solution is organized around the phases of the FinOps lifecycle: Inform, Optimize, and Operate, giving users a structured way to tackle cloud costs.
It aggregates usage data from multiple sources, including cloud providers, SaaS applications, and data warehouses, offering comprehensive cost insights.
nOps combines cost management with change management. It analyzes resource usage, suggests savings plans, and automatically implements rightsizing actions. The platform also tracks infrastructure changes for compliance.
Harness positions its Continuous Efficiency module as a solution that puts cost visibility into the hands of engineers and DevOps teams: it offers hourly insights into resource consumption across deployments, namespaces, and pods, rather than just project‑level reports. This allows teams to see which services are under‑ or over‑utilized and to take action quickly.
The platform integrates with CI/CD pipelines and helps stop idle resources automatically, combining cost monitoring with the larger Harness delivery platform.
Platforms that unify control across multiple public clouds and on‑premises environments. They provide provisioning, orchestration, policy enforcement, and cost visibility across heterogeneous infrastructures. Some include migration and workload placement tools.
Morpheus offers a unified orchestration layer for multi-cloud and hybrid environments, enabling self-service provisioning, policy enforcement, and integration with cloud APIs.
Formerly Xi Beam, Nutanix provides cost optimization, security compliance, and governance across hybrid environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises systems.
VMware’s suite offers unified provisioning and governance across VMware and public cloud environments. It supports infrastructure-as-code and integrates with policy enforcement tools.
These platforms are aimed at collecting logs, metrics, and traces from cloud workloads. They help identify challenges, correlate performance with business metrics, and ensure reliability. Many include AIOps features for anomaly detection and automated remediation.
Datadog offers full-stack observability, providing real-time metrics, logs, and traces for cloud, containers, and on-prem systems. It's APM module correlates application performance with infrastructure events.
Dynatrace provides AI-driven root-cause analysis across cloud, microservices, and user experience. It automatically maps dependencies, offering end-to-end visibility into performance.
New Relic consolidates telemetry data, offering visibility across applications, infrastructure, and browser sessions. It provides customizable dashboards and powerful analysis tools.
For engineering teams looking to automate resource provisioning, scaling, and management, these platforms offer powerful solutions to streamline operations, enforce policies, and reduce manual effort.
Terraform uses declarative configuration files to provision and manage resources across clouds. Terraform Cloud adds remote state management, access controls, and policy enforcement.
CloudFormation orchestrates AWS resources via templates; the Cloud Development Kit (CDK) lets engineers define resources using familiar programming languages.
Pulumi allows teams to write infrastructure code in general-purpose languages (e.g., Python, Go, TypeScript). It supports state management and policy enforcement across multiple clouds.
Security and compliance remain top priorities for enterprises. These platforms provide visibility, enforcement, and automation to ensure that cloud environments are secure and compliant with industry regulations.
Prisma Cloud, developed by Palo Alto Networks, is a comprehensive Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that offers robust security and compliance monitoring across cloud environments. It focuses on securing cloud workloads, containers, and serverless applications throughout the development lifecycle and across multicloud and hybrid environments.
Wiz is a unified cloud security platform, Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), built to secure everything in cloud environments, from code to runtime. It employs agentless, API‑based scanning to connect quickly and start delivering value within minutes
After exploring the top platforms from autonomous multi-cloud management to cost-focused tools, the question becomes: which one is right for you?
It’s easy to get caught up in flashy features and sleek dashboards. But don’t let vendors wow you with aesthetics. What truly matters is how well the platform performs in real-world, mission-critical scenarios.
Here’s how we recommend approaching it:
Vendors who start with "out-of-the-box features" instead of asking you about your specific business priorities are not interested in solving your problems, just showing off their product.
Start by clearly defining what matters most to your business: cost reduction, multi-cloud agility, reliability, or compliance. Be specific. For instance, if your goal is to reduce cloud spend by 20% or improve deployment frequency, this helps guide your evaluation and ensures the vendor focuses on what actually matters to you. Don’t let them pitch generic solutions.
If the platform vendor can’t integrate with your existing stack (like Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, etc.) during the pilot phase, you're in for a major headache.
Inventory your infrastructure, cloud accounts, Kubernetes clusters, and any other services you’re using. Be sure the CMP integrates smoothly with your existing CI/CD pipelines and other critical tools. If the vendor stalls on integration during the trial period, run.
Beware of platforms that provide only high-level visibility or require you to manually tag every resource for cost allocation.
Look for CMPs that provide granular cost allocation (by service, team, product, or unit). Ensure the platform can connect to billing APIs across providers and offers automated savings actions.. If they can't automate savings actions in real time, the system will just add more overhead.
If the platform only schedules actions or requires manual intervention for scaling and rightsizing, it’s not a fit for modern needs.
Examine whether the platform automates scaling, rightsizing, and remediation without human intervention. Does it use AI to detect anomalies, predict capacity needs, or make real-time adjustments? Sedai, for instance, applies AI to make real‑time adjustments without human intervention, which will appeal to teams looking for a self‑driving approach.
If the platform doesn’t collect metrics, logs, and traces across your stack or lacks AIOps capabilities, you're in danger of missing critical performance issues before they become outages.
Make sure the platform provides robust observability, including the ability to correlate performance data with costs. A good CMP will give you a holistic view of your entire environment and automatically detect root causes of performance challenges. If the vendor can’t demonstrate this in the pilot, don’t assume they’ll magically add this capability later.
Avoid CMPs that don’t enforce security policies or fail to provide continuous compliance monitoring against industry standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.
Verify that the CMP has strong security features, including identity management, network configuration enforcement, and encryption policies. Continuous compliance monitoring is a must, especially as your cloud environment grows in complexity.
If the vendor can’t show you a track record of financial stability or doesn’t offer enterprise-grade support, you may be putting your operations at risk.
Evaluate the vendor’s reputation, commitment to product development, and support options. Ask for SLAs and check whether they’ve been recognized by analysts. If the platform is not mature enough to handle enterprise demands or doesn’t offer sufficient support, it’s not the right choice for long-term growth.
Vendors who push for a full implementation without a clear, measurable pilot are often hiding inefficiencies.
Run a pilot with a limited set of workloads, and define success metrics (e.g., cost reduction, provisioning time, mean time to detect incidents). Compare baseline data to post-deployment results. Don’t settle for vague promises; demand that the platform show real, measurable results in your environment.
Cloud management platforms come in many forms. Some specialize in cost management, others in multi‑cloud orchestration, observability, automation, or security.
Each platform has its strengths and limitations based on these core capabilities. As cloud environments become increasingly complex, it is essential to choose a platform that effectively integrates multiple functions, reduces manual intervention, and optimizes resources autonomously.
Sedai stands out by combining these core functions with an autonomous engine that adjusts resources in real-time, reducing the need for manual intervention and driving continuous optimization.
Join us and gain full visibility and control over your cloud operations today.
Native tools provide cost visibility and basic optimization within a single cloud. A CMP offers a unified interface across multiple providers, integrates with third‑party services, enforces policies, and often includes advanced automation, observability, and governance features.
It depends on your requirements. Many CMPs include robust cost features, including budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing. If your organization operates at a large scale or requires specialized reporting, you might augment the CMP with dedicated FinOps platforms or integrate them.
Automated scaling and remediation aim to improve reliability by reacting to signals faster than humans can. Mature platforms allow engineers to define guardrails, such as maximum instance counts or approved regions, to ensure that automation stays within safe boundaries. Testing automation in non‑production environments builds confidence before wider rollout.
Cloud technologies evolve quickly. Review your platform at least annually or when major business changes occur, such as new compliance requirements, large‑scale migrations, or adoption of AI workloads. Continual measurement of key metrics (cost per unit, mean time to recovery, customer experience) will signal when a change is warranted.
September 24, 2024
September 24, 2025
Cloud management platforms in 2025 must go beyond mere visibility and alerts. The most effective tools should automate real-time actions, optimizing costs and performance without manual intervention. As cloud environments grow in complexity, platforms that proactively manage resources, rightsize workloads, and reduce inefficiencies will be crucial. By automating cloud operations, engineering teams can focus on higher-value work while maintaining performance and cost control. A true Cloud management platform should close the loop between insight and action, delivering smarter, more efficient cloud management.
Over the past decade, cloud adoption has shifted from an early‑adopter experiment to a mainstream requirement. Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach by 2027, and 92% are already using multi-cloud environments.
However, this flexibility comes with rising costs and complexity. A FinOps in Focus 2025 study estimates that 21% of cloud infrastructure spending, around US$44.5 billion in 2025, is wasted on underutilized resources.
As an engineering leader, you need more than just dashboards. You need tools that simplify operations, optimize costs, and give you better visibility across your cloud environments.
That’s why we have created this buyer’s guide to help you compare top platforms across key areas, cost management, multi-cloud and hybrid management, observability, automation, and security, so you can make the right decisions for your team.
A cloud management platform (CMP) is a software suite that sits above the underlying cloud services. Its goal is to give teams a unified way to provision, configure, monitor, and optimize resources across public clouds, on‑premises infrastructure, and container platforms.
CMPs typically offer:
Now, here’s the reality we’ve seen after years of living in this space: CMPs are great at showing you what’s happening. They’re less great at doing anything about it. Most platforms stop at visibility, leaving teams to chase after alerts and manually implement changes. That gap between insight and action is exactly where costs spiral out of control.
When we discuss cloud management platforms (CMPs) with engineering leaders, one of the first questions that arises is whether to opt for a cloud-native tool or a third-party, cloud-agnostic solution. The difference sounds simple, but it has a direct impact on how much control you keep and how much complexity you invite into your stack.
If 80% of your workloads are in AWS, don’t waste time chasing cloud-agnostic tools. Cloud-native platforms will offer deep integration and streamlined performance for your AWS environment, making them the more efficient choice.
But if you’re supporting AI workloads split across multiple providers, you’ll regret going all-in with a single vendor. In this case, a third-party cloud-agnostic platform becomes essential. It offers the flexibility to manage workloads across different cloud environments, optimizing cost, security, and performance.
For startups or small businesses that are heavily invested in a single cloud provider, a cloud-native solution is often sufficient. However, for larger enterprises or those in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, a third-party platform will provide more flexibility and centralized control.
As engineering leaders, you’re likely familiar with the growing complexities of managing cloud environments. Without proper tools and processes, cloud environments become expensive and difficult to govern. Cloud management platforms address several pressing challenges:
Here’s how engineering teams can benefit from CMPs in light of current cloud trends:
According to Forbes, 32% of cloud spend is unused, and KPMG reports that enterprises overspend by 35%, which is a nice way of saying “your cloud bill is more bloated than it needs to be.”
We’ve seen teams lose months because developers spun up shadow environments that weren’t tagged. Finance called it waste, engineers called it experimentation. CMPs done right prevent that clash.
With automatic tagging and visibility, CMPs ensure that every environment, whether active or experimental, is tracked properly and tied to the right cost center.
According to Gartner, 69% of IT leaders report budget overruns, and this is not just a line on a report. It’s SREs being dragged into meetings, trying to explain why a VM costs more than it should, while the finance team throws their hands up. It's the age-old finger-pointing between engineering and finance, and it gets old real quick.
CMPs address this by providing real-time insights into your usage and budget. With automated cost management and forecasting tools, CMPs act as the “alarm system” to keep budgets from completely derailing.
Despite the overspend, cloud spending continues to rise. 68% of organizations plan to increase their cloud budgets in 2024, driven by the need to support generative AI workloads and other critical services. However, this rising cost comes with a catch: it’s easy for overspending to go unnoticed until the bills arrive.
CMPs ensure that, as cloud budgets rise, they are aligned with business value. By tracking the ROI of cloud expenditures and providing real-time insights, CMPs help engineering teams optimize spend and ensure it aligns with business objectives.
We’ve seen organizations so deep in multi-cloud that they can’t even remember which resources are running on what provider. AWS, GCP, Azure, everything’s different, and managing them separately is a nightmare. And that’s the issue with a lot of multi-cloud setups: you end up with new challenges around cloud sprawl, duplicate services, accountability, cost trade-offs, and security enforcement as KPMG’s 2024 report points out.
CMPs break down those silos, offering centralized control and cross-cloud visibility. This gives your teams a clear picture of what’s running where, with cost allocation and security policies enforced across the board.
As the FinOps Foundation notes, 63% of FinOps practitioners are now managing AI spend. But the problem is you can't rely on spreadsheets to do FinOps for you. Imagine having to manually track every service, every team, every spend unit across a mix of public clouds and private infrastructure. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
CMPs streamline this process by integrating cost allocation, forecasting, and budgeting directly into your cloud management. With automated savings actions and granular tracking, CMPs put cloud cost management on autopilot.
Even if your team isn’t overspending, poor cloud governance can still lead to major headaches. Misconfigured resources, rogue services, and uncontrolled access are just waiting to cause a mess. We’ve seen companies scramble after an audit because they didn’t have proper compliance tracking in place.
CMPs enforce governance policies automatically , whether it’s tagging resources for billing, ensuring compliance with security frameworks, or even managing identity access. The best CMPs handle this in the background, without you needing to keep a constant eye on it.
Engineering teams are under pressure to deliver faster while maintaining high reliability and uptime. CMPs centralize monitoring and automate performance checks, ensuring that teams can meet Service Level Objectives (SLOs) without getting bogged down in manual tasks.
The truth is, CMPs are essential, but most usually stop at visibility. They’ll happily tell you that you’re wasting 35% of your spend, but the hard work of fixing it still falls back on your engineers. In 2025, that’s no longer good enough.
With AI workloads, multi-cloud sprawl, and nonstop cost pressure, the baseline expectation isn’t knowing there’s a problem; it’s solving it before it drains your budget or slows your release cycle. That’s why the next big question isn’t “Do you need a CMP?” (you absolutely do), but rather “Which CMP actually helps you move faster while keeping spend under control?”
With AI-powered automation and real-time scaling becoming standard, choosing the right cloud management platform is key for your team to stay ahead of the curve.
Here’s a roundup of top platforms, categorized by their core strengths. This gives you a solid starting point to evaluate the best fit for your needs.
At Sedai, we created our platform to solve the very problems our founders, two platform engineers, experienced firsthand with traditional cloud management tools. These tools often leave teams with dashboards and alerts, but little proactive capability to act in real-time as cloud environments evolve at rapid speeds.
Sedai works differently:
For enterprises, this means:
Why Sedai Stands Out
Unlike most platforms that stop at visibility or orchestration, Sedai's self-driving cloud closes the loop, ensuring your cloud is not only optimized but also secure, regulations-compliant, and cost-effective.
These Tools focus on budgeting, forecasting, rightsizing, commitment management, anomaly detection, and chargeback/showback. These platforms typically integrate with billing APIs and provide detailed spending reports. Many incorporate machine learning to suggest or implement optimizations.
CloudZero provides detailed visibility into cloud spend, breaking down costs by service, team, and feature. Its platform allows teams to align spending with unit metrics (e.g., cost per customer) and provides actionable recommendations for rightsizing.
FinOut is a comprehensive cloud cost management solution that empowers FinOps, DevOps, and Finance teams to effectively manage and reduce cloud spend while improving profitability without requiring code changes or modifying existing tags. The solution is organized around the phases of the FinOps lifecycle: Inform, Optimize, and Operate, giving users a structured way to tackle cloud costs.
It aggregates usage data from multiple sources, including cloud providers, SaaS applications, and data warehouses, offering comprehensive cost insights.
nOps combines cost management with change management. It analyzes resource usage, suggests savings plans, and automatically implements rightsizing actions. The platform also tracks infrastructure changes for compliance.
Harness positions its Continuous Efficiency module as a solution that puts cost visibility into the hands of engineers and DevOps teams: it offers hourly insights into resource consumption across deployments, namespaces, and pods, rather than just project‑level reports. This allows teams to see which services are under‑ or over‑utilized and to take action quickly.
The platform integrates with CI/CD pipelines and helps stop idle resources automatically, combining cost monitoring with the larger Harness delivery platform.
Platforms that unify control across multiple public clouds and on‑premises environments. They provide provisioning, orchestration, policy enforcement, and cost visibility across heterogeneous infrastructures. Some include migration and workload placement tools.
Morpheus offers a unified orchestration layer for multi-cloud and hybrid environments, enabling self-service provisioning, policy enforcement, and integration with cloud APIs.
Formerly Xi Beam, Nutanix provides cost optimization, security compliance, and governance across hybrid environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises systems.
VMware’s suite offers unified provisioning and governance across VMware and public cloud environments. It supports infrastructure-as-code and integrates with policy enforcement tools.
These platforms are aimed at collecting logs, metrics, and traces from cloud workloads. They help identify challenges, correlate performance with business metrics, and ensure reliability. Many include AIOps features for anomaly detection and automated remediation.
Datadog offers full-stack observability, providing real-time metrics, logs, and traces for cloud, containers, and on-prem systems. It's APM module correlates application performance with infrastructure events.
Dynatrace provides AI-driven root-cause analysis across cloud, microservices, and user experience. It automatically maps dependencies, offering end-to-end visibility into performance.
New Relic consolidates telemetry data, offering visibility across applications, infrastructure, and browser sessions. It provides customizable dashboards and powerful analysis tools.
For engineering teams looking to automate resource provisioning, scaling, and management, these platforms offer powerful solutions to streamline operations, enforce policies, and reduce manual effort.
Terraform uses declarative configuration files to provision and manage resources across clouds. Terraform Cloud adds remote state management, access controls, and policy enforcement.
CloudFormation orchestrates AWS resources via templates; the Cloud Development Kit (CDK) lets engineers define resources using familiar programming languages.
Pulumi allows teams to write infrastructure code in general-purpose languages (e.g., Python, Go, TypeScript). It supports state management and policy enforcement across multiple clouds.
Security and compliance remain top priorities for enterprises. These platforms provide visibility, enforcement, and automation to ensure that cloud environments are secure and compliant with industry regulations.
Prisma Cloud, developed by Palo Alto Networks, is a comprehensive Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that offers robust security and compliance monitoring across cloud environments. It focuses on securing cloud workloads, containers, and serverless applications throughout the development lifecycle and across multicloud and hybrid environments.
Wiz is a unified cloud security platform, Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), built to secure everything in cloud environments, from code to runtime. It employs agentless, API‑based scanning to connect quickly and start delivering value within minutes
After exploring the top platforms from autonomous multi-cloud management to cost-focused tools, the question becomes: which one is right for you?
It’s easy to get caught up in flashy features and sleek dashboards. But don’t let vendors wow you with aesthetics. What truly matters is how well the platform performs in real-world, mission-critical scenarios.
Here’s how we recommend approaching it:
Vendors who start with "out-of-the-box features" instead of asking you about your specific business priorities are not interested in solving your problems, just showing off their product.
Start by clearly defining what matters most to your business: cost reduction, multi-cloud agility, reliability, or compliance. Be specific. For instance, if your goal is to reduce cloud spend by 20% or improve deployment frequency, this helps guide your evaluation and ensures the vendor focuses on what actually matters to you. Don’t let them pitch generic solutions.
If the platform vendor can’t integrate with your existing stack (like Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, etc.) during the pilot phase, you're in for a major headache.
Inventory your infrastructure, cloud accounts, Kubernetes clusters, and any other services you’re using. Be sure the CMP integrates smoothly with your existing CI/CD pipelines and other critical tools. If the vendor stalls on integration during the trial period, run.
Beware of platforms that provide only high-level visibility or require you to manually tag every resource for cost allocation.
Look for CMPs that provide granular cost allocation (by service, team, product, or unit). Ensure the platform can connect to billing APIs across providers and offers automated savings actions.. If they can't automate savings actions in real time, the system will just add more overhead.
If the platform only schedules actions or requires manual intervention for scaling and rightsizing, it’s not a fit for modern needs.
Examine whether the platform automates scaling, rightsizing, and remediation without human intervention. Does it use AI to detect anomalies, predict capacity needs, or make real-time adjustments? Sedai, for instance, applies AI to make real‑time adjustments without human intervention, which will appeal to teams looking for a self‑driving approach.
If the platform doesn’t collect metrics, logs, and traces across your stack or lacks AIOps capabilities, you're in danger of missing critical performance issues before they become outages.
Make sure the platform provides robust observability, including the ability to correlate performance data with costs. A good CMP will give you a holistic view of your entire environment and automatically detect root causes of performance challenges. If the vendor can’t demonstrate this in the pilot, don’t assume they’ll magically add this capability later.
Avoid CMPs that don’t enforce security policies or fail to provide continuous compliance monitoring against industry standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.
Verify that the CMP has strong security features, including identity management, network configuration enforcement, and encryption policies. Continuous compliance monitoring is a must, especially as your cloud environment grows in complexity.
If the vendor can’t show you a track record of financial stability or doesn’t offer enterprise-grade support, you may be putting your operations at risk.
Evaluate the vendor’s reputation, commitment to product development, and support options. Ask for SLAs and check whether they’ve been recognized by analysts. If the platform is not mature enough to handle enterprise demands or doesn’t offer sufficient support, it’s not the right choice for long-term growth.
Vendors who push for a full implementation without a clear, measurable pilot are often hiding inefficiencies.
Run a pilot with a limited set of workloads, and define success metrics (e.g., cost reduction, provisioning time, mean time to detect incidents). Compare baseline data to post-deployment results. Don’t settle for vague promises; demand that the platform show real, measurable results in your environment.
Cloud management platforms come in many forms. Some specialize in cost management, others in multi‑cloud orchestration, observability, automation, or security.
Each platform has its strengths and limitations based on these core capabilities. As cloud environments become increasingly complex, it is essential to choose a platform that effectively integrates multiple functions, reduces manual intervention, and optimizes resources autonomously.
Sedai stands out by combining these core functions with an autonomous engine that adjusts resources in real-time, reducing the need for manual intervention and driving continuous optimization.
Join us and gain full visibility and control over your cloud operations today.
Native tools provide cost visibility and basic optimization within a single cloud. A CMP offers a unified interface across multiple providers, integrates with third‑party services, enforces policies, and often includes advanced automation, observability, and governance features.
It depends on your requirements. Many CMPs include robust cost features, including budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing. If your organization operates at a large scale or requires specialized reporting, you might augment the CMP with dedicated FinOps platforms or integrate them.
Automated scaling and remediation aim to improve reliability by reacting to signals faster than humans can. Mature platforms allow engineers to define guardrails, such as maximum instance counts or approved regions, to ensure that automation stays within safe boundaries. Testing automation in non‑production environments builds confidence before wider rollout.
Cloud technologies evolve quickly. Review your platform at least annually or when major business changes occur, such as new compliance requirements, large‑scale migrations, or adoption of AI workloads. Continual measurement of key metrics (cost per unit, mean time to recovery, customer experience) will signal when a change is warranted.
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