UptimeCloud helps companies track and predict Amazon cloud costs

Cloud computing is one of the IT industry’s hot sectors right now, and analyst firms are predicting it will heat up further in the next few years. According to one such market analysis study conducted by IDC, public cloud services are predicted to grow five times faster than traditional IT products, from more than $16 billion in 2009 to $55.5 billion by 2014. But the analyst firm adds that many CIOs are still having serious concerns about cloud cost monitoring and management.

Despite these concerns, cloud computing is still making its mark on the industry and appears to be here to stay. In order to meet the numbers predicted by IDC, an organization needs to understand just how much money that latest cloud project is going to cost. Trying to figure out the cost of an application, service, or workload running in the cloud with complicated spreadsheets and guestimated pricing will no longer suffice.

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For most companies that have already jumped into the soft and fluffy IT cloud, costs are still a relatively unknown factor until the bill comes in at the end of the month. That unknown cost doesn’t usually sit well with decision makers.

“It has become crucial for all sizes of companies to tie cloud success to cost as well as overall system performance,” said Phil Didaskalou, CEO of Uptime Software. “Cloud computing can help make organizations more efficient. However, without a clear and detailed view into the cost of cloud deployments, it can be very difficult for IT to justify new cloud initiatives.”

With today’s economic climate, there’s a growing focus on IT financial management. But today’s tools generally provide only a snapshot or analysis of the past rather than including the present and future. While these tools are useful in giving you an idea of how much you’re spending, it’s always after the fact. What’s needed is a way to also forecast future cloud costs. Imagine being able to give the CIO a forecast of how much a cloud deployment will cost if scaled up versus how much it presently costs by application, line of business, user, geographic location, account, or even single instances.

To help address this challenge, Uptime Software has created a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management subscription service called UptimeCloud, an online cost and capacity management service that helps measure, monitor, and manage the cost and capacity of a cloud-based infrastructure. As a SaaS solution, there is no software to install. Everything is done through the UptimeCloud portal, which today runs in Amazon Web Services (AWS); this fact, in itself, should help the company to scale in order to meet any growing demand.

Built around the concept the company calls “economic cloud intelligence,” the UptimeCloud service features a series of dashboards to help provide key information:

• Real-time cloud cost monitoring. See what you’re spending on cloud infrastructure and services in real time, view one or more multiple cloud accounts through a single dashboard, and identify departmental or LOB cloud usage for SLAs and billing.
• Predict cloud costs and increase cloud savings. Easier cloud budgeting and cloud planning with accurate trends and forecasts for yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly cloud costs. Automated cloud cost saving recommendations help you reduce cloud costs and eliminate the risk associated with unexpected cloud bills.
• Right-size cloud capacity. Meet dynamic and changing needs to avoid cloud performance and capacity problems; track real-time and historical cloud capacity usage; highlight forgotten, zombie, and underutilized cloud resources; and identify overloaded and bogged down cloud instances.

According to the company, the success of applications and services in the cloud and in virtual and physical environments has, until now, been only two dimensional: availability and performance. However, Uptime considers performance and availability to be commodities in cloud computing, whereas the cost of cloud computing is the key differentiator and will be the essential factor that influences what, when, and where IT organizations deploy.

UptimeCloud is still in beta and currently offers support for only Amazon’s EC2; however, broader public cloud support is in the works for future releases, and the company expects to ship final code later this summer. Uptime also said it is looking to add support for other infrastructure providers so that it can offer hybrid cloud pricing.

As of this writing, pricing for UptimeCloud had yet to be announced. However, it promises that pricing will be competitive no matter if the customer is a small or medium-size shop with five cloud instances or a Fortune 1000 corporation with 2,000 instances running in the cloud.

This article, “UptimeCloud helps companies track and predict Amazon cloud costs,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.