So for some time, cloud computing has started transforming the hosting market. The market is really showing signs of big transformations coming up. New business starting from scratch easily take on this ‘new’ type of infrastructure for their online activities. Most of the traditional businesses need more push before going on adventure with for example AWS.

The traditional hosting market first was controlled by software giants. Open Source really changed this and already set the door wide open for basically anyone to join. Now with cloud services in addition, every developer can develop software and make this available per hour with flexible scaling. No server administrators and long term contracts needed.

Now. With these fairly new cloud services on the market, there is room for new tools and visions to sprout.

The impact of these changes go beyond your software and IT department. Managers and controllers need information they can use to run their part of the business and make decisions. With an arsenal of resources available, you should keep an eye on your costs and upcoming expenses. Maybe even more important you don’t want to have conversations like this happening:

  • Manager: ‘Yo! What is our burn rate on AWS?’
  • Dev: ‘Lemme check!’
  • *Opening console, typing all kinds of commando’s*
  • Dev: ‘Currently about 30 EC2 instances, 4 TB on S3 with 50.000 put and get requests yesterday’
  • Manager: ‘That’s more than last week! What is this operation costing us…!’
  • Dev: ‘How about you look up the prices and do some math?!’

There are a few reasons why you want to keep these conversations from happening:

  1. Annoyed developers
  2. Annoyed managers
  3. Managers feel they don’t have enough control on the costs
  4. Waste of time

Our need was pretty much expressed when I needed to calculate costs on a few project in order to bill one of our clients. I didn’t know where to start. Now, while talking about this with Michiel our minds got spinning. Why isn’t there just a simple tool too find out? Of course there are some ways to find usage. But basically our only notion of costs is on the credit card statement we receive. Amazon offers options to some extend, but is limited by their focus on developers.

While talking about this we came up with a little concept called ‘Qloudwatch‘ and Michiel starting building a first prototype. On his blog he has a more detailed list of features and screenshots of the app. Feel free to contact us to test the application. We want you to help us improve the service!