The Cloud is in, and C-level execs everywhere are rushing to try to take advantage of new capabilities and services – but often without really understanding what they’re getting into. Many companies spend money on cloud solutions they don’t really need as it’s often difficult to determine how many instances are being deployed at once and to compare other economic scenarios.
A number of new services like UptimeCloud and Cloudability have emerged to monitor cloud services, but startup Cloudyn claims to go further than competitors by showing you the most efficient way to provision your cloud workloads.
According to Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner, Cloudyn will “Tell you how to change your provisioning to achieve your results at the lowest possible cost. We look at your use patterns and we look at the pricing of the vendor and bring you a cloud configuration map showing you how to save more.”
Customers register their cloud instances with the system and Cloudyn provides a SaaS dashboard which details all your instances, databases and storage. The environment is monitored, and analytics are provided through the dashboard which help you see where any inefficiencies lie. Statistics on CPU load, memory usage, I/O and networking are tracked and after a week Cloudyn can provide you with optimization scenarios to help you cut costs. The scenarios show where adjustments need to be made, and how much you could save as a result.
For example if you have a complex environment setup in Amazon’s cloud, with multiple applications on different instances, tracking and analytics may help to show you where one application is being heavily used but the other suffers only minimal load. In that case you might be better off keeping the first in an elastic computing setup and the second provisioned in a less expensive manner.
It will also provide you with a list of possible actions – combining instances geographically consolidating virtual instances from multiple machines onto a single box to get better performance at lower cost, and so on. Over time usage peaks, bottlenecks and over or under provisioned services can be easily identified through these analytics and your network tightened up to improve performance and reduce costs.
Right now, Cloudyn is free, and will be available until 20th of April 2012. After that date, users will be able to look at their dashboard and get some analytics and notifications of usage spikes for free, but other services like cloud optimization, predictive analysis and “proactive projection” will cost between $80 per month and $700 per month depending on the size of your current cloud infrastructure.
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Toby TremayneA writer and software developer of more than 14 years experience, Toby is passionate about helping new and small businesses make the most of the internet and cloud technology. When he's not writing or telling stories he's busy trying to make technology easier to use for the average business person, and can often be found in dark corners practicing magic tricks or lock sport.
