CoreStack Reviews

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.

My main use case for CoreStack is for cost optimization and billing operations, and I'm using it a bit for SecOps and CloudOps, but majorly for FinOps and BillOps.

A specific example of how I use CoreStack for FinOps or billing operations is for many of our customers who are running their workload on the cloud; whether AWS, Microsoft Azure, OCI, or Google, everyone is looking for continuous cost optimizations. That is one of the reasons we have opted for CoreStack. It gives a detailed review of the account running in AWS, providing recommendations on reserved instances, saving plans, and orphan volumes. It gives extensive details on the FinOps and the cost optimization, which helps us to optimize the workload for the customer, thus giving us stickiness.

The major thing about my main use case is that we are using CoreStack for BillOps as well, where we give a detailed invoice to the customer with the blended cost, using unblended raw data from AWS and blending it with our margins before sharing the invoices with the customer. While the major use case is FinOps, we also utilize it for BillOps.

The best features that CoreStack offers and stand out for me are definitely their well-architected review because they let you run the well-architected review on all the hyper-scalers, which otherwise would require separate UIs or portals for AWS, Azure, OCI, and Google. CoreStack being a single tool that can run the well-architected review on all four clouds gives us an edge over native tools or other options. The second standout feature is the single pane of glass for multi-cloud cost optimization.

The single pane of glass for multi-cloud cost optimization helps me day-to-day by bringing a lot of operational excellence; it saves a lot of time because rather than going to each and every account or multi-cloud portal, which takes a lot of time, having everything on a single pane of glass increases efficiency, delivers results in less time, and provides clear reporting that can be shared with the customer in PDF or CSV formats.

CoreStack has positively impacted my organization by saving hours of time for reporting—for example, the governance report which my employees used to take at least four hours for one customer. Since I'm sending out 20 reports every month, that equates to 80 hours, thus saving me two man-weeks every month. In terms of cost, that's approximately $8,000 pure saving if I estimate $100 an hour for my architect. So, $8,000 a month is at least saved only by reporting, and although things such as customer experience and stickiness are more qualitative, we are certainly saving time and improving customer experience, which overall is pretty good.

CoreStack can improve by adding a segregation of reserved instances that are shared across child accounts or managed accounts from the parent account, ensuring a cost allocation for all reserved instances or saving plans purchased in the master account and used by child accounts, as that clear segregation should be readily available within the tool.

I give it an eight because, as I mentioned, a few things from the billing operations need to be added, and we need more security features, particularly since the market is increasingly demanding better security tools for cloud management platforms, including cloud security posture assessments.

I have been using CoreStack for almost four years.

CoreStack is stable.

In terms of scalability, we utilize the SaaS platform of CoreStack, and we onboard as an IDP from AWS. We haven't encountered any issues regarding scalability; the SaaS platform easily accommodates our growth, and we have seen no problems at all over the past four years.

CoreStack has positively impacted my organization by saving hours of time for reporting—for example, the governance report which my employees used to take at least four hours for one customer. Since I'm sending out 20 reports every month, that equates to 80 hours, thus saving me two man-weeks every month. In terms of cost, that's approximately $8,000 pure saving if I estimate $100 an hour for my architect. So, $8,000 a month is at least saved only by reporting, and although things such as customer experience and stickiness are more qualitative, we are certainly saving time and improving customer experience, which overall is pretty good.

We receive wonderful support from CoreStack. We have plenty of content that helps us improve our MSP strategy and achieve customer stickiness, so the support has been pretty good.

Customer support is wonderful; we have a dedicated account manager, and we can easily reach out to them or to a solution architect. With multiple support avenues aligned to us as a partner, we receive very responsive and helpful support.

Positive

We previously used a native solution and opted to switch to CoreStack because we wanted a single pane of glass for multi-cloud management that also encompassed SecOps, CloudOps, and BillOps. The native solution offered fewer features and involved more operational overhead, prompting the switch.

I have definitely seen a return on investment; it is measurable. It has saved hours of time for the reporting, especially the governance report, which my employees needed four hours to prepare for one customer. With 20 reports every month, that's 80 hours saved, equating to two man-weeks per month, or $8,000 in savings based on a $100 hourly rate for my architect. Thus, we save a lot of time on reporting, and while customer experience gains are more qualitative, we are improving stickiness and experiences overall, which is pretty good.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is pretty good because we received private pricing, which I cannot disclose. The setup was included as a one-time expense, and licensing is straightforward, mostly based on consumption, which I believe has been competitively priced across the market.

Before choosing CoreStack, we did evaluate other options such as Aquila Cloud and AnOps back in 2021, and CoreStack emerged as the more feature-rich and mature solution.

My advice for others looking into using CoreStack is to recognize that it is a wonderful product, and if you choose to use it, leverage its full potential. Do not limit yourself to just FinOps; explore all its features, including BillOps, SecOps, CloudOps, and especially security governance. Evaluate everything across all four hyper-scalers, and you are likely to love it.

My company does not have a business relationship with CoreStack beyond being a customer; we are not even a reseller. However, we operate in the MSP model, onboarding the product to use CoreStack for our end customers. So while we are customers, we primarily utilize it in a managed services capacity.

I give this review a rating of eight. We have covered almost everything regarding CoreStack.

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.