Amazon staffs up to give Trusted Advisor more powers
AWS has big plans for its Trusted Advisor and other enterprise support offerings but giving more metrics to customers will irk third-party service partners. Read more »
More fun facts about AWS usage, this time from Cloudyn
Companies like Cloudyn want to make Amazon Web Services less of a mystery to its users, but they have lots of competition — including from Amazon itself. Read more »
Cloudability tool gives Amazon customers more detailed, custom looks at their cloud costs
Cloudability says its new AWS cost analytics tool can handle the deluge of hourly cost data Amazon churns out and help customers nip budgeting and other usage problems in the bud. Read more »
Look out below! Amazon offers free trial of Trusted Advisor monitoring tool
photo: Barb Darrow
A month-long free trial of the Amazon Web Services’ monitoring and alerting tool has to spook a raft of smaller companies offering similar services. Read more »
Cloudyn says it exposes hidden Amazon storage costs and you’d be surprised how big they are
photo: Flickr / getinet
Do you know how much Amazon storage you’re using? Do you really? Cloudyn says it can tell you the real data and recommend ways to cut costs. Read more »
Amazon watcher Newvem starts charging to monitor your cloud
photo: Newvem
Examining Amazon Web Services usage is a cottage industry for a dozen or so startups. One of them, Newvem, has offered its service free to select customers. Now that the service is broadly available, it’s time to monetize. Read more »
Wanna track your Amazon cloud costs? Here’s another way to do so
Cloudyn and Scalr give joint customers a better look at what’s going on in Amazon Web Services; Apptio launches a free service to help customers optimize loads on AWS, Azure and Rackspace clouds. Read more »
Newvem makes its Amazon analytics available
Newvem has tested its analytics with customer data for 8 months and says its key finding is that customers need to hear how use of Amazon services will make them more profitable. Saving money is one thing, making money is better. Read more »
Cloudability says it pinpoints actual Amazon cloud spend
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Cloudability says its analytics can cut your overall cloud services cost. Available now for Amazon Web Services, support is coming for other major cloud service providers, A raft of companies have sprung up to help companies get a better grip on their cloud spend. Read more »
The new cloudonomics or how you can spend less and get more with cloud
photo: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY
Commoditization of the cloud may never happen, because like the hotel industry, there are too many variables that will matter. Some people will pay more for compute in a specific geographic location and even for computing on a specific day. Read more »
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Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Newvem adds Amazon S3 storage analytics to its roster
Newvem, which already kept taps on Amazon EC2 instances, is now adding S3 storage to the services it monitors and analyzes for customers. The goal is to help them pick the right storage tier for their different data sets, Newvem president Zev Laderman said. Read more »
Rackspace launches cloud monitor
Rackspace CTO John Engates said the company’s new monitoring service, based on its Cloudkick acquisition two years ago, will give customers a better way to monitor the performance of their cloud resources. As more companies consider cloud deployment, tools like these are becoming essential. Read more »
Amazon sets sights on cloud cost sprawl
The beauty of Amazon Web Services is they’re easy to set up and run. The problem with those services is they’re easy to set up and run. Now Amazon is offering companies a better way — with a little prep work — to track those costs. Read more »
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Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The cloud will get cheaper in the future, but not before these challenges are addressed and overcome. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudability nets $8.7M to manage more cloud spending
Cloudabilty, the Portland, Ore.-startup that seeks to help companies manage their spending across clouds, just landed $8.7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by The Foundry Group and included contributions from 500 Startups, Trinity Ventures and ad firm Wieden + Kennedy. Read more »
Cloudability tool tracks Amazon reserved instances
Cloudability’s new Reserved Instances Explorer helps companies keep track of and best utilize their discounted Amazon reserved instances even across accounts. The tool can search Amazon EC2 instances by size, region, operating system and expiration date. Read more »
How collective intelligence is reshaping systems management
Big data has always had a place in the world of systems management, but it’s sweet spot might be in the cloud. Especially with a new model such as cloud computing, there could be a real value in learning from what your peers are doing. Read more »
Newvem calls in Dome9 to harden Amazon cloud workloads
Newvem, the feisty Israeli startup that made waves pointing out just how vulnerable (or badly configured) many customers’ Amazon EC2 cloud instances are, is taking steps to remedy that situation by partnering with Dome9, a security SaaS provider. Read more »
Amazon adds billing alerts to cloud services menu
Amazon cloud services may be cheap, but even those small charges can add up. Following a raft of third-party companies that offer AWS monitoring services, Amazon has stepped up to offer its own proactive billing alerts for Cloudwatch customers that enable it. Read more »
Newvem nets $4M to scan Amazon’s cloud
Newvem, the Israeli startup that’s making a name for itself analyzing Amazon Web Services usage for potential customers, netted $4 million in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners. Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors are also participating. Read more »
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Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Newvem pulls back the curtain on Amazon cloud usage
Newvem, the startup that aims to help companies make the most out of their Amazon Web Services instances, has some new data that might shock the Amazon faithful. A high percentage of AWS users are paying for way more compute power than they need. Read more »
APIs & data dominate TechStars Cloud demo day
Eleven startups building the “plumbing of the internet” presented today for the TechStars Cloud demo day, and the common thread running through them all was making it easier to build app-like products and services as well as an obsession with data. Plus one cool consumer startup. Read more »
Cloudability gives Rackspace users free cost monitoring
Rackspace customers can now use Cloudability’s service for free to keep tabs on their cloud computing costs. As business use of cloud computing grows, the need for such dashboards and metering services will rise as well. Read more »
Startup takes on cloud overprovisioning
As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud platforms, many are paying for more cloud than they need. That overprovisioning is the problem Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, is taking on with its new software as a service. Read more »
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Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
10 cloud startups to watch in 2012
All startup activity around cloud computing in the past few years has been great, but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Here are 10 cloud startups launched in 2011 that have a chance to make it big in 2012. Read more »
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Cloud computing 2012: a pessimist’s guide
How does the cloud market for the next year look? There will be no silver linings or lemonade. This research note, part of GigaOM Pro’s outlook for 2012, examines startups’ chances to challenge traditional enterprise IT practices, cloud pricing models, the true state of federated clouds, and how IT jobs will change in the coming months. Expect plenty of defensive M&A, cloud lock-in, phantom data discovery, outages, availability headaches, pricing confusion and job displacement over the next 12 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudability gets $1.1M, could save you tens of thousands
Cloudability, a startup that bills itself as “Mint.com for the cloud,” has raised $1.1 million in seed funding for its service that helps companies keep an eye on their cloud-computing spending. It recently let one user spot an exploit that could have cost the company dearly. Read more »
Cloudability offers cloud cost-tracking APIs, free beer
With the public beta of Cloudability’s cloud cost-tracking service, new APIs are available to help customers access their billing and usage information from popular cloud providers including Salesforce.com, Azure, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Oh, and if you refer a paying customer, there’s free beer! Read more »
Meet Cloudability, ‘Mint.com for the cloud’
We’ve all heard stories about cloud-service fees run amok, only spotted when the bill comes due. Cloudability, part of Structure 2011 LaunchPad, wants to keep companies abreast of what they’re spending in the cloud with a free app that shows them what’s being spent and where. Read more »
