Throughout the day I’ve watched some extremely interesting demos of products that have either been conceived or sharpened during the inaugural TechStars Cloud class in San Antonio. A few of those companies stood out, but none shined quite as brightly as Cloudability, a service to manage all of your cloud spending in one place.
As I warned in my previous piece, storing things in the cloud and managing big data might not be something that stops traffic in your eyes, but when it comes to building the backend of most of the software and apps that you use today, it’s everything to a company.
When you have a successful application or service online, you’re probably distributing your spending for hosting, analytics, support, and maintenance over many products. Managing those costs, since they’re usually a moving target based on usage, has been nearly impossible to do.
I say “has been”, because Cloudability has decided to focus on that problem, and it’s done an amazing job in doing so. Up until now, folks who manage the cloud spending at companies have had to visit individual sites, navigate multiple dashboards, export data, and bring all of that information into a big old spreadsheet. If you’ve ever managed a massive spreadsheet, you know that it’s not only a pain in the ass, but it’s outdated as soon as you hit save.
Bring it all together, be aware of spikes
The Cloudability dashboard is drop-dead easy to understand, as it pulls in all of the data from your hosting accounts, including Rackspace, Amazon, and services like Heroku. The best part of having a dashboard like this is that you can check it a few times a day and make sure that there aren’t any major spikes or oddness with how your systems are running:
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In addition to a detailed dashboard, you can set up email alerts to keep you informed when one of your hosting services crosses a specific spending threshold, allowing you to make changes on the fly if need be. This is something that previously required all of that logging in and spreadsheeting that I mentioned before.
The company isn’t new, but the mentorship the team received from those participating in TechStars Cloud was extremely valuable, the Portland based company told me.
Cloudability is a perfect example of a small team with laser focus cracking the code on a problem that will only continue to plague companies as they start managing their data in the cloud. Something like this could honestly save your company thousands of dollars and even more in effort trying to bring all of this data together.
Companies like Simple and SlideShare are already using the service, and Rackspace just announced that it will be rolling Cloudability out as a feature for all of its 175k+ customers.
The TechStars Cloud class was an impressive one and I’ll be sharing more stories and thoughts over the next few days. I had to tell you about Cloudability as quickly as I could though, because this is a company to watch.
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