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 also include Cloud Vertical and 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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud

According to a post on the Amazon Web Services blog:

As the AWS account owner, you now have fine-grained control over usage and software costs. Roles and permissions are created and managed through IAM, making it easy to get started, and easy to add controls for AWS Marketplace to new or existing IAM groups. You can now use Marketplace permissions to control access to Marketplace and to the EC2 instances that it launches, based on a user’s role in the business.

There are three pre-built roles set up for different user types — although they can all be customized. A read-only mode lets administrators view subscribed software to see who’s using what but not actually manage it. A manager function allows the user to subscribe to software but not launch or manage the underlying Amazon EC2 instances.  And a full control role is a superset of all of the other permissions that allows that rights holder to subscribe, create, and manage the underlying EC2 instances.

IAM, which provides some central controls and permissions for multiple users on a central account, has been available for years. “With it you can do users vs. allowed action. For example, you might be able to create and delete S3 buckets, but Bob is only able to read S3 buckets, but he can create new EC2 instances and you can’t. All of these things can cause the monthly bill to go up (or down, I suppose if you delete stuff),” said Robert Shear, CEO of Greystone Solutions via email. Greystone is a Boston-based developer and heavy AWS user.

Ed Byrne, CEO of Cloud Vertical, a startup dedicated to helping customers get the most of their AWS infrastructure, said  this move “abstracts AWS away from being Infrastructure as a Service only.”

“Now AWS admins can give business users [the ability to] deploy applications themselves without worrying about underlying infrastructure or security,” Byrne said.

Amazon recently launched a marketplace that lets users trade their Amazon Reserved Instances, although that looks like a separate effort. But taken together these efforts do broaden AWS reach beyond hard-core developers.

The ability for a company to trade the Reserved Instances it has already bought, makes the notion of prepaying for compute power more palatable to finance departments, Byrne said. “Amazon Web Services are starting to become less of a black hole to CIOs.”

For more on early traction of AWS Marketplace, check out GigaOM Pro analyst Jo Maitland’s take (subscription required.)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Metered IT: the path to utility computing
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud

While not disclosing the amount of the investment, Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne said it’s an important vote of confidence given that Citrix is the company behind both Xen, the virtualization foundation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CloudStack, an open-source platform that powers private clouds.

Hey guys: Cheap cloud could be cheaper

Byrne said utilization of public cloud resources is not optimal so while the perception is that Amazon EC2 is cheap, it could be cheaper still if people really made sure they’re really using up what they pay for.

Many companies buy, say, reserved Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS US East region, but then their developers launch new instances in Oregon because they’re cheaper, Byrne said. That’s the problem Cloud Vertical and other companies like Newvem and Cloudyn are attacking.

Vendor-backed accelerators on the rise

Citrix is not the only tech vendor in the startup acceleration biz — SAP is doing something similar in Silicon Valley — but SAP’s program focuses specifically on building out the Hana ecosystem, while Citrix looks for interesting startups in the broader infrastructure and cloud services arena. The goal is to help these fledgling companies bridge early seed investments and A Series funding, said Jeremiah Shackleford, who heads up marketing for the Citrix accelerator. It has funded about a dozen startups, most recently, Cumulogic, a Platform-as-a-Service provider.

“We put in a small — maybe $250,000 — investment and also offer the companies office space in Silicon Valley and help with customer development,” Shackleford told me in an interview.

Reed Sturtevant, managing director of Project 11, a Cambridge, MA-based seed investor and a director of TechStars Boston, said the accelerator model is growing because of the changing economics of startups.

“The programmatic approach of an accelerator model is a response to the question of how do you scale investment and mentorship across many companies as the dollar amount needed to validate each new business continues to drop.  You can often do with $25,000 today what used to take $500,000 ten years ago, so let’s say you want to apply $1 million to support external innovation, it takes a very different approach to spread that across 20 companies vs. across two,” Sturtevant aid via email.

Come hear more about the deployment and provisioning of public cloud resources from Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels and others at GigaOM’s Structure: Europe in Amsterdam later this month.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Near-term strategies for IT managers
• A near-term outlook for big data
• The new IT manager, part 1