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Reading Notes #303 http://ift.tt/2zT2Yg5

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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 wildly successful as Amazon Web Services have been, there’s still a lot of noise about how big enterprises don’t want to put their precious workloads on this public cloud  infrastructure.  The Amazon cloud is not safe or reliable enough for these important workloads, some say. Here’s a news flash: Big companies may or may not be wary of Amazon’s cloud, but they’re already using it. And this despite multiple snafus at Amazon’s US-East data center complex in the past year. It’s a pretty safe bet that virtually every Fortune 1000 company is running workloads beyond test and dev in Amazon’s cloud and that means trouble for incumbent IT providers like IBM, HP, Dell and others which are scrambling to respond. Case in point: Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner, whose company helps businesses make best use of AWS, told me that 30 percent of its AWS customers are large enterprises. And while their applications vary, they do include business-critical workloads, and not just development and testing, he said. Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, a New York City-based cloud computing and managed hosting provider, agreed that big accounts aren’t just fooling around with AWS. “Many of the most cited barriers to cloud adoption have been addressed at this point and it’s getting more difficult for territorial IT decision-makers to defend managing infrastructure in-house.  You’d be surprised just how many companies have already made the move.  It’s not just Netflix.” Amazon is pressing its first mover advantage to reinforce the notion that it is “the” brand in cloud. “As Kleenex is to tissue, Amazon is to cloud,” Ziegler said. To capitalize on that sentiment, Logicworks this week launched a new managed service that will enable it to manage business customers’ AWS deployments. Over the past year, AWS unveiled an array of more enterprise-like support and service options. Expect Amazon execs — including CEO Jeff Bezos (pictured above), AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy, and CTO Werner Vogels to talk more about this market at the AWS Re:invent show next week in Las Vegas. The show also flaunts a  pretty robust enterprise IT conference track. The timing is good: An array of competitive public cloud offerings are now coming online from  Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard, and others. AWS girds for more competition Amazon is nothing if not proactive. Just as it rolls out services before announcing them, now it’s prepping for more intense competition for enterprise workloads. Rivals say they are better suited for enteprise needs than Amazon. Rackspace says its customer support sets it apart; HP says its enterprise service level agreements (SLAs) will win enterprise customers over. Sources say that Amazon now offers special deals including discounts to enterprise companies doing as little as $250,000 a year in AWS business. Six months ago, it only offered such deals to companies doing at least $1 million of business annually. Why the change now? One thing that IBM and HP have that Amazon does not is long-term ties to big customers. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment on its discounting practices. Said one AWS partner: “AWS feels that IBM entering with SmartCloud and HP with its public cloud may take away enterprise customers because [those older vendors] have much better relationships with them.” Developments like Telefonica’s joint public cloud offering with Joyent is also a problem for Amazon given that telcos also have tight enterprise relationships and telcos “own the network edge,” he said. A stealth attack on enterprise IT Some AWS partners said the company prefers to work under the radar in general and that stealth mode hid what they say is an escalated enterprise sales push. AWS has hired sales engineers and others from enterprise-focused companies like HP, SunGard and EMC. “One of the senior AWS guys told us ‘we like that our competitors don’t think we’re active in the enterprise. When they find out it’ll be too late,’” he said. One thing’s for sure, Amazon has a huge head start in public cloud services. The total net sales attributed to the company’s “other” category –which largely consists of AWS — were $608 million in Amazon’s third quarter ending September 30. For the nine months preceding that, “other” sales totaled $1.582 billion. So to say AWS is now a $2-billion-a-year business is not a stretch. Amazon’s problem is that it’s had that field much to itself so far. That won’t be true going forward. http://dlvr.it/2WfBDR @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