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#SuryaRay #Surya Newvem, which promises to watch your Amazon Web Services usage for you and recommend ways to get the most mileage out of rented compute and storage, is now ready to charge for its services. Newvem CEO Zev Laderman (left) with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Large enterprises will negotiate their own deals, but for smaller accounts the company will offer free services until the customer goes over 50,000 AWS resource hours per month.  Then it charges a cent or two per additional resource hour depending on usage. According to Newvem’s price list, there are additional fixed-rate charges for more advanced analytics of S3 storage or EC2 reserved instance use. One service the company is particularly proud of is tracking AWS usage by department or business function within a large organization. “Amazon itself is very horizontal — it’s just infrastructure — they’ll tell you how many instances and how much storage you use all in one bill. What we do is let you slice and dice Amazon resources against your divisions — no one else can do that,” said Newvem president Zev Laderman. “If you have R&D and engineering and manufacturing folks and want to tie all AWS usage to each unit to make sure they’re consuming it properly, if there are security issues or vulnerabilities with how ports are setup, if you want to charge-back from a central unit, you can do all that.” It’s getting crowded in here There are a dozen or so companies in this AWS stalking market and they all claim to do what the others cannot. Cloudability, which now says it monitors $250 million in cloud spending,  charges customers a percentage of their overall cloud spend after a free 30-day period. Dublin-based CloudVertical offers similar tiering. Cloudyn offers basic services for free, then tiered pricing for more advanced services above that. There will be more third-party analytics and reporting services coming down the pike. One newbie is New York-based CloudAware, an AWS consultancy that has done monitoring and analytics work for AOL, Sony and Reed Elsevier (see disclosure) and is now looking to sell a service based on that work. CloudAware will provide a service that alerts management, via a news feed-like feature, to any changes in configurations to AWS resources, said CloudAware CEO Mikhail Malamud. “If someone launches a firewall change and that change is on a non-standard port that will kick off an approval request,” Malamud said. These Amazon partners all fulfill a need by enterprise customers to get a better grasp on what many see as a black box.  For one thing, Amazon services are billed as cheap and easy, but cheapness is all relative. At least one Amazon expert experienced unexpectedly high charges  moving S3 data to Amazon’s cheaper Glacier data archiving service for example. So there is a real need for services that monitor and alert customers about their AWS usage. Nuances aside, these companies all compete with each other. But probably more worrisome longer term for  the startups in this space is that Amazon itself keeps adding deeper and broader billing and analytics capabilities. Offerings like its Trusted Advisor service, now in beta and more granular billing, are eating away at territory these small companies have staked out. The next year or so will, for sure, be an exciting ride for partners in the Amazon ecosystem. _Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in Giga Omni Media, the company that publishes GigaOM._ http://dlvr.it/2g5DyY @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a whole ecosystem of startups building businesses around making Amazon Web Services less inscrutable to business customers. And some of those startups are now partnering up with each other to provide a fuller suite of services.. Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner. The latest partnership is between Cloudyn, which captures and analyzes info about user’s AWS utilization — cost, performance and utilization of EC2 instances etc.  – and Scalr which helps users’ deploy and manage their cloud over time. Under a new pact, customers can see Cloudyn’s breakdown of their AWS usage on their Scalr dashboard  and get recommendations on a course of action. Once they choose an option, Scalr will automate it in one click, Sharon Wagner, CEO of Cloudyn told me via email. Scalr itself supports Amazon, Eucalyptus, Cloudstack, Nimbula and Rackspaceclouds but the initial joint offering is for AWS only. Newvem, another company that watches AWS usage for customers announced a slate of partnerships at AWS: Reinvent two weeks ago. Its partners include Cedexis, Cloudant, Datapipe, Garantia Data and others. Other startups in this cloud monitoring field include Cloud Vertical and UptimeCloud. On Wednesday, Apptio joined the fray with a free Apptio Cloud Express for tracking AWS, Windows Azure and Rackspace workloads and making optimization recommendations. All of these companies hope to carve off a piece of a growing market. Gartner estimates that enterprise spending on public cloud services will grow to $207 billion in 2016 from $109 billion this year. But cloud watchers will have to duke it out not only with each other but with the cloud providers themselves as they add more analytics to their own services. Amazon, for example, is beta testing a Trusted Advisor service which provides many of the same metrics as these third parties. http://dlvr.it/2d6XF9 @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya As nearly everyone knows by now, Amazon Web Services are a cheap and efficent way to deploy compute power. But as we increasingly hear from a raft of startups like Newvem, Cloudability, Cloudyn, and others — that AWS could be cheaper and more efficient still — if you use Newvem’s, Cloudability’s, or Cloudyn’s analytics and tracking tools. As of Thursday, Newvem is making its analytics broadly available, just a few days after Cloudability did the same.  Newvem said it’s gained valuable insights from the 8 months its free service has been in trial.  First and foremost “we’ve learned that cloud users are sick and tired of hearing about saving costs … we’re helping cloud users [instead] focus on their business and how the cloud impacts profit,” said Cameron Peron,  Newvem VP of marketing. The Israeli company measures all Amazon resources used by a given company in real time and uses that data to recommend better deployment options.  A dashboard exposes key performance indicators (KPIs) for C-level executives, IT managers and developers, Peron said. This market for analytics and dashboards into what some call Amazon’s “black box” is getting pretty crowded.  Not only are there a raft of feisty startups, but established players like Rightscale are starting to get into the act with their own tools. But the biggest factor on the horizon may be Amazon itself  which is starting to make its own costs more trackable. If you’re confused about which of these tools to use, all of these companies, including Newvem, will be at Amazon’s ReInvent show later this month in Las Vegas. You can check them out for yourself and also hear what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and CTO Werner Vogels have to say. At Structure Europe last month, Vogels promised all sorts of “unbelievable” new services to come from the company some of these are bound to be announced at the show.   http://dlvr.it/2Txhjk @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Cloudability, which helps users ascertain costs of a wide range of cloud-based services, is now making its analytics broadly available for Amazon Web Services with support to come for an array of other cloud  services. The Portland, Oregon-based startup says its new analytics provide a picture of actual AWS use and generates reports of actual use, recommending actions to save money. “We focus on continuous IT improvement — the ability to enable cloud users to put IT where they want it,” company co-founder J.R. Storment told me in an interview. “As a company, we know who’s wasting money because we track the costs — we take the bills.” The biggest problem with true cost assessment is finding out what developers and others are actually _doing_ in Amazon. Cloudability’s solution is to push company finance chiefs  to deny any spending that happens outside Cloudability’s reporting structure. If you buy X number of EC2 instances and this much S3 storage on your expense account, you won’t be reimbursed for it unless you use Cloudability.  (That sounds good in theory but I’d like to see it in practice. Developers are notoriously hard to wrangle.) Cloudability Pro analytics  offers a dozen or so configurable reports and allows custom views of infrastructure use using more than 30 metrics Because Amazon offers such a wide — and ever-changing — array of services with shifting prices, getting a handle on projected as well as actual cost is difficult . A raft of companies — Newvem, Cloudyn, UptimeCloud — have sprung up to ease this load while incumbents like Rightscale are adding similar cost and workload assessing tools. Even Amazon itself is taking a stab at making its costs more trackable and predictable. One longtime AWS user speaking at an AWS Meetup in Cambridge, Mass. last night said buying into Amazon Reserved Instances — the priciest types — incurs its own risk. When you lock into a Reserved Instance — for one or three years — you get a lower per hour rate, but you may not use the whole period. Amazon may lower the price during your allotted period, or it may roll out a better instance type in that period. Still, given the relatively low cost compared to deploying servers in house, he doesn’t see much of a downside. Tools like Cloudability claim they’ll let you wring the most possible value of whatever instance types you buy. Unlike many of the other vendors mentioned, Cloudability says it will, at some point, offer its super-duper reporting and analytics across all the major clouds, not just Amazon. However right now, the tool only works with Amazon. http://dlvr.it/2TMYbZ @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Newvem, the feisty Israeli startup that is obsessed with evaluating customers’ use of Amazon’s cloud resources is adding Amazon’s S3 storage monitoring to the mix. Newvem team. To date, Newvem’s service looked at people’s use of Amazon’s EC2 compute resources. One tool, for example, tell users when their loads should be moved to Amazon reserved instances and how much they would save by doing so. Amazon offers different tiers of its services at different price points. Newvem clearly sees an opportunity in helping customers pick the most cost-efficient tier for their compute loads, and now for storage as well. As Amazon rolls out more cloud services, like its Glacier archiving capabilities, customers need help deciding where their different data sets should be stored most effectively, said Newvem CEO Zev Laderman.  ”Our analytics show what files or objects are of high use and need to be available [fast] and what is of lower use and can be stored cheaper.” Little-used, older data can be stored much less expensively in Glacier than in S3, he said. Newvem is one of several companies that aim to give customers a fuller, more detailed look of what, exactly, is going on in their cloud. While Newvem focuses on Amazon exclusively, other entries like Uptimecloud, Cloudyn, and Cloudability work across clouds. http://dlvr.it/2DQCK7 @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya A new Rackspace service will give its customers a better view into how their cloud infrastructure is working around the world, according to John Engates, Rackspace CTO. Launching Wednesday, the new Rackspace Cloud Monitoring service comes out of Rackspace’s purchase of Cloudkick two years ago. The availability of such services that provide a better view into how a company’s cloud workloads are running is increasingly important as more companies evaluate moving more tasks into cloud infrastructure. Users can interact with the system either via the API or a new cloud control dashboard which they can use to “spin up monitoring instances, ping their services. Right now it’s just the basics, we’ll add features and capabilities over time,” Engates said in an interview Tuesday. Engates downplayed any suggestion that the new service will compete directly with Rightscale or other third-party services. “Rightscale, I think, is primarily for autoscaling your application and the reason they have monitoring is to provide basic insight into how the applications are performing so they can trigger autoscaling events,” he said. In some ways, the new service does compete with offerings like Pingdom, he said. “That provides some basic uptime availability monitoring through a web interface but it doesn’t really scale well to thousands of instances across clouds,” Engates said. “We’re stripping out the need to go to a web interface and instead giving customers direct access to the engine. The real power here is the API and the automation behind it that customers can use as they want.” Rackspace also has  a deal with cloud monitoring service Cloudability, but that’s more about tracking cloud costs than giving users a better, more direct handle on cloud performance. Cloud providers like Rackspace and Amazon — which just unveiled a better way for companies to monitor their Amazon Web Services spending — see that customers really need a better window on what’s going on in their cloud deployments. Offerings like this one are a reaction to that. --- http://dlvr.it/22T0Tl @suryaray