Krishan Lal Khatri| Cloudtweaks
With the growing popularity of cloud computing, and enterprises opting for migrating significant chunks of their IT infrastructures and services on public clouds like AWS, the need for performance optimization is being realized as one of the major issues. According to a report published by Ernst & Young, cloud computing has brought fundamental shift in IT altering the technology industry power structure, improved business agility for all industries and increased everyone’s access to computing, storage and communications power.
However, the report also terms a multitude of factors that cloud service providers (CSPs) and cloud users (enterprises that subscribe to cloud services) must carefully consider. One of those factors is pricing and business model complexities arising out of highs and lows in IT assets utilization, which occurs due to the dynamic nature of business needs.
The metered model puts additional requirements on both providers and users to monitor and scale the usage of resources so that users are able to realize the promised cost saving through pricing based on ‘as-needed’ usage of IT infrastructure and applications.
“The issue of vertical scalability is very important when considering the use of cloud computing because you are often charged based on computing resources used, much like the old mainframe model”, Lori MacVittie, subject matter specialist on cloud, writes in her blog. “If an application does not vertically scale well, it’s going to increase the costs to run in the cloud.”
Cloud users, mostly small businesses and enterprises usually have limited expertise in managing cloud services, and require third party tools and advisors in order to utilize the public clouds efficiently and effectively. AWS has recognized this reality, and made its proprietary Trusted Advisor service free for the month March. A growing number of third party tools have also entered into the space to address this problem. CloudCheckr is one of the leading third party tools that claim to provide far more functionalities than Trusted Advisor.
CloudCheckr’s stated goal is to help public cloud users to improve performance and reduce costs simultaneously. CloudCheckr is a recently launched startup that offers its services free of cost until April 10. The startup has been successful in adding 400 new users in past 60 days despite limited marketing efforts.
The startup claims to help enterprises in following areas related to cloud usage:
- Resource tracking by using historical data, trend analysis, and change monitoring to enable cloud users understand their present position and future roadmap.
- Increasing availability by identifying user exceptions and providing detailed instructions regarding how to remedy the issues.
- Cost savings through right-sizing of resources and reducing spending without any impact on performance.
- Optimizing subscription purchases by using different cost scenarios and recommending the best options.
CloudCheckr claims that they are far better than their competitors and Trusted Advisor.
