Scalr introduces Cloud Cost Analytics

Scalr’s cloud management platform enables enterprises of any size to provision and govern infrastructure across multiple clouds and is available as an on premise, hosted SaaS or Open Source solution. Scalr Cloud Analytics will now be included in Scalr Enterprise Edition.

Scalr Cost Analytics has been developed to help Scalr customers overcome the disconnect that exists between Cloud Resource Usage: the launching and running of infrastructure in the cloud, and Cloud Cost Management: understanding and controlling cloud expenditure.

“Cloud adoption in the enterprise has fundamentally changed how organizations financially manage infrastructure. Cloud has brought business agility, but the ease and speed with which developers and engineers launch resources in the cloud have ended the days of fixed infrastructure costs,” says Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr.
“While previously IT and finance were solely in control of an organization’s infrastructure spend, that process must now also include developers and engineers, who must use resources in a cost effective manner and be involved in the cost reduction process,” adds Stadil. “Scalr Cost Analytics delivers tools that enable these disparate groups to work together to deliver a holistic view of cloud usage and costs and take a DevOps approach to their organization’s infrastructure.”

“Bringing an aggregate view of cloud spending and resource management to the enterprise is best delivered integrating cloud analytics with cloud management across public and private clouds,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst for cloud computing at Constellation Research. “Enabling finance to track and budget costs, as well as providing guidance for IT and development delivers a true enterprise analytics platform for cloud computing.”

Scalr Cost Analytics will address the needs of cloud developers, IT managers, and financial managers with separate toolsets based on their roles and responsibilities.

For Financial Managers
Financial managers are tasked with understanding if cloud spend is adhering to the organization’s infrastructure budget, and if it’s possible to save on costs by using the cloud. Cost Analytics will allow the financial manager to set up cost centers and projects that adhere to their current financial schema of business or operational units. Users will be able to analyze the total spend, growth and projections, along with trends like rolling averages and more, for each cost center and project. Additionally, Cost Analytics will allow financial managers to allocate budgets to measure spend against for individual cost centers and projects. With this toolset, financial analysts will have the ability to gauge the financial efficacy of using cloud resources in their organization.

For IT and Operations
IT and Operations managers are charged with infrastructure management and control; key to that control is understanding what cloud resources are being utilized and correspondingly their associated costs. To begin, IT managers will be able to define the price per hour of server types for both public and private clouds (the official pricing of public cloud providers will be available by default). After developers and engineers begin to use these priced resources, the IT manager will then be able to break down spend by the different cloud resources used by various teams within their organization. By filtering via metrics like growth, periodic averages, capacity and instance count/hours among others, Scalr will enable the IT manager to identify inefficient spending patterns and potential solutions. Scalr’s Cost Analytics will also allow the IT manager to model future costs to plan for additional capacity. Finally, by having these various details of cloud spend at their fingertips, IT managers are empowered with the ability to audit their official cloud bill every month to check for overages and inaccuracies.

For Development
Developers and engineers can only increase business value if the applications they build remain cost effective. By exposing the cost of infrastructure during design time, engineers will know exactly how much a given set of cloud servers will cost before a single instance is even launched. After launching their farm and beginning their project, engineers also have the ability to understand usage patterns of their application in terms of instance count/hours, and gauge how their choice of instance types/scaling limits will change spend.

Phased Release
Scalr’s initial release of Cloud Analytics will provide tooling for financial managers, allowing them to set up their framework for logically dividing up cloud spend across business units. Later releases due throughout 2014 will include the cost management portal for IT managers and DevOps.
Key Takeaways about Scalr Cost Analytics
? Completely Integrated with Scalr Cloud Management: Scalr Cost Analytics is a feature set of Scalr Cloud Management designed to help enterprises get insight into costs and usage associated with using public or private cloud platforms. Scalr Cost Analytics is included in Scalr Cloud Management Platform at no additional cost.
? Governance: Scalr Cost Analytics delivers enterprise-grade role based access control, so that information is viewed relative to user role and responsibilities.
? Multi-Cloud Cost View: Scalr Cost Analytics achieves a holistic view of both usage and costs across public and private clouds. Multiple stakeholders in an organization can view costs by cloud, application, as well as business unit, and analyze use down to the individual instance in order to figure out the best course of action and budget.
? Forecasting and Scenario Planning: Scalr Cost Analytics produces forecasting on both current usage as well as historical data. Decision makers can then analyze alternative use cases and evaluate costs based on different clouds, instances, regions, and more and gain consensus from cloud infrastructure stakeholders.
? Cost Optimization: Scalr Cost Analytics, combined with Scalr’s other Cost Efficiency features such as Lease Management and Showback and Chargeback, will enable organizations to diagnose their cloud infrastructure and act upon opportunities to reduce waste and costs within the Scalr Cloud Management Platform. Enterprises can then also implement budget controls.