One of the biggest concerns users have with public cloud resources is not knowing how much they will cost, given the pay-as-you-go model.
"IT shops are becoming cost centers for service delivery," says William Fellows, a researcher at the 451 Group. "But they're looking for ways to determine how their clouds are running, how much it's costing and whether it's a good value."
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Vendors provide some services around tracking usage. Amazon Web Services, for example, last week announced more granular data, allowing users to track their services hour by hour.
But there is a growing ecosystem of cloud management tools. Some help companies manage, track and optimize their use of public or private cloud resources. Others help companies automate and deploy cloud resources. And others act as a platform for managing public cloud resources.
Below is a list of 16 cloud management tools, broken up by category: cost tracking, automation and provisioning, and cloud management platform. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list, but rather an overview of some of the players.
Cost tracking
Cloudability: Provides cost usage metrics, as well as predictions of how much of certain resources users are consuming and which ones are under-utilized. The company's application programing interface (API) allows users to import metrics into various other tools for storage and analysis. Cloudability works across multiple public cloud providers as well.
More information: Cloudability
Cloudyn: Israeli-based Cloudyn provides tracking of cloud resources and recommendations of how to optimize cloud usage. It offers a free reserved instance calculator, which helps customers calculate costs related to reserving virtual machines in AWS's public cloud, and has a premium enterprise version that will provide recommendations of which cloud resources to use and alerts of underutilized cloud resources. The company claims that it helps customers avoid an average of 40% of their costs by optimizing their cloud usage. Cloudyn recently announced a partnership with Scalr to help customers automate the provisioning of cloud resources based on recommendations from Cloudyn's analysis tools.
More information: Cloudyn
