Do you know how many times Amazon Web Services changed the pricing of its cloud services in 2011? No? Neither do I.
Cloud services are often dynamic with variable pricing and keeping track of price changes and optimizing your services accordingly can be quite an undertaking, particularly as more services are migrated to different cloud service providers.
With companies migrating to Cloud services in record numbers in order to address their business inefficiencies, many are bringing those inefficient practices with them to the cloud. Over-provisioning of resources when migrating to cloud services is one common inefficiency, and balancing the costs and performance of those services is not a trivial undertaking, until now that is.
I had the opportunity to speak with Sharon Wagner, founder and CEO of Cloudyn about their new SaaS service which aims to address over-provisioning and help customers optimize their cloud services. Competitors in the segment include Cloudability which monitors cloud services and warns users when reaching pre-specified thresholds. However, Cloudyn’s service which recently went live goes beyond monitoring, helping users optimize their cloud environments.
When I asked Sharon about competitors like Cloudability, Sharon put it this way,
Cloudability provides visibility for Amazon costs, though what do you do next? How do you rightsize your Cloud, consuming the right resources at the right time? We help Cloud customers dynamically optimize, provide insight and take it to next level providing configuration information with specific instructions to optimize without negatively impacting your operations.
The Cloud agnostic company currently supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), is adding Rackspace in 2Q12, and Microsoft Azure in 3Q12, with other cloud service providers like GoGrid to follow. Future plans include integration with cloud management platforms like Rightscale that would make services provisioning recommendations.
Sharon claims average customer cost savings of 41% comprised of price optimization 17% and rightsizing 24%, based on 45,000 virtual servers being monitored for over 50 customers.
Cloudyn is offering a free trial until April 30th with prices ranging from $80 to $700 per month going into effect May 1st.
Business Innovations 
Mark Chmarny (@mchmarny)
February 22, 2012
For Sharon to try to compare services which Cloudability already had for six month to that of Cloudyn, which they promise to deliver in Q3, is somewhat disingenuous. Also, some of that feature parity they promise simple is not currently possible, do they have a visibility into upcoming API enhancements in Rackspace and Azure?
Johanny
February 22, 2012
I registered with Cloudyn next week. Cool stuff, a lot of data points measured. Recommendations includes price reservations and EC2 downscaling (Saw RDS as well, but didn’t looked at it yet). They have to work-out the UI a bit, talked to their support about it and they said additional UI improvements are coming down the road.