As momentum around cloud computing continues to drive adoption, it’s not surprising to start seeing more articles about the real costs. One such example is a recent posting I read on VentureBeat. Entitled New study finds small startups typically overspend on Amazon web services by 50% or more, the post recapped a study conducted by Newven that found, in this case, that small startups “are spending money on Amazon that they don’t need.”
I suspect that these findings aren’t unique to small companies, but instead offer a view into the new realities cloud computing presents businesses of all sizes: benefit from the power of elasticity and on-demand compute resources—with a pay-as-you-go business model—that makes it almost too easy to overspend. This balancing act reminds me of the oft-quoted Stan Lee-ism “with great power comes great responsibility” and this rings ever true for cloud computing.
Cloud computing begs for the usage reporting and controls businesses have spent years implementing and fine-tuning for their on-premises infrastructure. However, it’s not uncommon for cloud service offerings to lack analogs to effectively meter and manage cloud costs. Well, outside of the monthly invoice or credit card charges.
This is one of the reasons Skytap, and our Skytap Cloud, delivers capabilities like CloudControl. Being designed for businesses and optimized for complex computing environments, means full visibility and control is not only important to Skytap, it is at the very core of our platform. Skytap administrators gain this oversight of their Skytap Cloud deployments through a complete set of cloud computing management tools that enable the efficient utilization of cloud resources.
Translating to real-world benefits: tap into all the benefits of cloud computing while mitigating the risk of surprises when the monthly invoice arrives.
CloudControl offers quota management, real-time usage monitoring, reporting, and alerting similar to your existing on-premises infrastructure. This gives administrators familiar controls to manage current costs and forecast future utilization. And, when combined with configurable usage quotas, threshold-based notifications, and VM auto-suspend after periods of inactivity, they can avoid the overspend that has plagued companies like those mentioned in the VentureBeat post.
