Connect your AWS, GCP, or Azure account and Pump starts analyzing your cloud spending automatically, no agents or setup required.
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If you manage cloud infrastructure, the question of how to use the Pump comes down to one thing: linking your provider. Pump is a cloud cost optimization platform that sits between you and your provider as a billing and optimization layer. It handles commitment management, infrastructure recommendations, real-time cost visibility, anomaly flagging, and security-gap detection across AWS, GCP, and Azure. The platform’s welcome documentation describes a deliberately small setup surface, so the learning curve is mostly about reading what it finds.
What Is Pump’s Setup Process?
The platform does not require agents, infrastructure changes, or engineering lift.
- Open Pump and choose your cloud provider: AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Authorize the connection with your provider credentials.
- Wait for the first analysis pass to complete.
What Does Pump Do After Connecting?
Once connected, Pump runs continuously rather than performing a one-time audit. It tracks savings over time, generates forecasts, checks compliance accuracy, and monitors your security posture. The platform’s positioning is that you gain savings, visibility, and intelligence in one place without switching between separate tools.
The main outputs you will see are commitment recommendations (which reservations or savings plans to buy), infrastructure suggestions (such as rightsizing or instance family changes), and anomaly alerts when spending deviates from expected patterns. Treat the dashboards as a triage list, not a report to file away.
What Pump Is Not
A few common assumptions lead people astray. Pump is not a tool you install locally, not a standalone billing calculator, and not something that requires you to reconfigure your infrastructure first. It is also not purely a cost tracker, since the platform bundles in security and compliance features that would otherwise live in separate services.
When Does Pump Make Sense?
A simpler comparison:
| Situation | Best Starting Point |
|---|---|
| Multi-account AWS/GCP/Azure usage | Connect Pump and review commitment recommendations |
| Stable single-workload costs | Check native cost explorer first |
| Unknown anomaly patterns | Let Pump run for one full billing cycle |
| Security posture questions | Review Pump’s continuous monitoring output |
References & Sources
- Argonne National Laboratory. “Pump Handbook Series.” General reference for pump fundamentals and applications.