Cloudyn's Cloud Cost Management Tool Works Across AWS, Rackspace, Google

Cloud cost management is a big deal. Figuring out true costs across several business units and several clouds running several types of workloads makes it hard to pin down and allocate spending. Cloud monitoring and optimization provider Cloudyn has enhanced its capabilities with a multi-platform cost allocation tool to address this problem. The tool, announced this week, is designed to help allocate and reign in cloud spending.

The difference between its Cost Allocation 360 and other cloud cos management tools, said Cloudyn, is that it takes more than developers into consideration. Accounting can use it to figure out true costs, and the CFO is better able to allocate spending to units. Security groups get a handle on what’s going on with automated security policies, and developers can use it to eliminate a lot of the manual labor associated with properly tagging and categorizing usage. It integrates and analyzes cost across all cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Google Compute Engine.

Cloudyn recently raised a $4 million round. CEO Sharon Wagner said the company has a technological edge in its ability to work across multiple clouds and strength in hybrid cloud. The company has mentioned before that it would introduce more granular cost visibility, down to the cost of delivering the application itself, and the new tool is a big step in that direction.

The tool calculates all cloud-related costs, including miscategorized, shared, and untaggable resources. Cloudyn said that half of cloud resources in the enterprise are uncategorized or are improperly tagged or allocated. This means that many businesses don’t understand the true cost of their cloud activities and have limited information for making decisions going forward.

While the system tries to automate the process as much as it can, it still requires some work calculating what some workloads truly cost. Better categorization and tagging is a start.

Cost Allocation supports business rules for handling complex deployments, shared resources, and helps the enterprise get a grip on "shadow IT" costs and uncategorized cloud consumption. The financial guys will be capable of associating costs with specific business units, departments and regions, getting an idea of where the money is going and how much.

Smarter tagging and cost modeling are the two big draws. Enhanced cost modeling for previously untaggable resources (e.g. DynamoDB, Data Transfer, Reserved Instance) lets business apply rules to attribute costs.

The majority of the company’s customers use AWS. Wagner said that 8 percent of AWS workloads are monitored by Cloudyn.

Competitors include RightScale, with its Cost Calculator, and Cloudability. TSO Logic is arguably another competitor, though it centers on energy consumption to deliver cost per transaction, user and other metrics. The cloud providers themselves are arguably competitors as well, as they continue to provide more granular insight into billing. However, their competitive positioning ends at their cloud boundaries, while companies like Cloudyn build their strengths across multiple-platforms.