How to balance cloud resources?

As IT vendors accelerate adoption of cloud services from Amazon and its major competitors, more and more vendors are beginning to find they can no longer control their service costs more effectively.

Because cloud services are financially opaque, not only do some IT vendors spend a lot of money but also overvaluate cloud computing resources that take up valuable cloud computing needs of other users. This will surely become a big issue if it can not be fundamentally improved in the short term.

"An AWS [server] instance that would have required a machine-based instance to serve a large number of users has now been over-expanded due to the fact that we started using AWS [Amazon Web Services]," said Len Barney, a system administrator at a Houston-based shipping company. "We are facing cloud expansion"

Some industry observers blame the unbridled expansion of cloud services and the attendant cost of growth, to the extent that administrators lack effective tools to manage their service costs, especially those running on public cloud services Service

"The unexpected cost of many organizations deploying services and applications in the public cloud, unfortunately cost calculators, monitoring tools and tight overhead control come to nothing when it comes to balancing overhead and performance," said Paul Burns, president of Neovise , The company is a home focused cloud computing consulting firm.

All of the above are negative news. The good news is that Burns has seen some products that have helped IT vendors scale cloud services and applications. Some of these solutions provide administrators with "actionable, actionable advice" through process-based feedback that provides administrators with the information they need to balance and rebalance cloud resources.

Effective tool to prevent cloud service expansion

A company called Cloudyn, an Israeli start-up, is working to prevent the cloud from expanding and recently they introduced a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. A company spokesman said the service not only gives administrators insight into cloud usage and consumption, but also gives administrators a customized, step-by-step approach to doing so.

"You can not change what you can not see, so visibility is the first step toward optimizing cloud computing spending," said Sharon Wagner, Cloudyn's chief executive officer. "The dynamics of cloud costs, the environment, and the application lifecycle have made it hard for consumers to make a difference with less resource overhead and avoidance of management devil."

Administrators and external providers also have difficulty understanding who is using what services and how often they are used, in which case administrators tend to over-deliver them, obviously raising costs.

"Providers can not control their own expenses and costs, so for the sake of security they initially subconsciously provide cloud computing," Wagner said. "They need more visibility on performance and consumption"

As a result, administrators not only lost control of costs and lost control of computing power in the cloud, but eventually they failed to put the good piece of cloud computing on the cutting edge.

"Many end up not only failing to deliver on-demand services, but losing the original mindset of using cloud computing to save money," Wagner said.

Cloudyn's new technology provides administrators with personalized advice on current and future cloud investments through its proprietary algorithms and event-driven engine. Cloudyn is working to make the technology suitable for cloud environments offered by other vendors, but is currently only compatible with AWS cloud computing and database services.

Another competitor in the market is 6fusion, which debuted their Cloud Resource Meter for VMware's vSphere this week for the first time at their Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara. This free cloud tool is designed to standardize the cloud infrastructure of metering providers and consumers. It has been reported that it makes it easier for administrators to compare the cost differences between running internally and running the same workload in the cloud.

The product's control interface, which combines a private data center and third-party cloud operators, provides a console to allow administrators to access, measure and optimize hybrid cloud infrastructures.