RightScale’s Cloud Budget Management Software Goes Into General Availability

Cloud portfolio management company RightScale has launched its Cloud Analytics product into general availability.

It is a cost-management solution that works across multiple clouds. The company announced a beta version in November 2013.

Built to help customers manage their cloud budgets, the platform provides usage and cost analysis. It also has some predictive capabilities, or “scenario planning” across major public and private clouds.

Hassan Hosseini, RightScale product manager for Cloud Analytics, said customer response to November’s beta release had been positive. “In just a few months, more than 1,000 customers participated in the Cloud Analytics public beta program,” he said.

Some of those customers include the VW Group’s Audi of America division, a property data services company for the insurance industry called BuildFax and MoneySuperMarket, a British price comparison website for financial services.

BuildFax CTO Joe Emison said the solution helped address unpredictability of public-cloud costs. “This is due to both wanted expenses, from business growth, as well as unwanted expenses, like forgetting to shut down servers,” he said.

“RightScale Cloud Analytics provides automated emails that give me the right level of detail to help me understand quickly whether I am on budget and identify any unexpected cloud usage.”

RightScale has added numerous features since the beta release:

Scheduled reports: Scheduling automated daily, weekly and monthly cloud cost reports to come to your email inbo. The reports reveal trends in cloud costs, highlighting potential issues before they significantly impact your bill. If there are unexpected changes, you can quickly jump into your Cloud Analytics account directly from a link in the email to investigate further.

Enhanced scenario builder: Enterprises can compare different instance types and clouds as they map out future cloud usage. Scenario Builder helps forecast the cost of moving applications to the cloud, the costs of using different clouds and resources, the costs associated with increased cloud usage and the impact of buying AWS Reserved Instances.

Budget alerts: Cloud users, managers and finance teams can get alerted when budgets are exceeded or when cost overruns are projected based on current spend rates.

Identifying waste: Identify zombie cloud instances: servers that got stranded during boot oftentimes unbeknownst to the user.

Multi-account Reserved Instance visibility: AWS users can use their own consolidated billing structure to analyze RI usage across accounts. This enables AWS customers to make better decisions on RI purchases and ensure that they are using already-purchased RIs.