Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them.
Amazon offers Reserved Instances at different rates depending on term of commitment — either one, two or three years. Cloudyn’s Reserved Instance Calculator will use predictions based on usage patterns to recommend optimal purchases. Given that Amazon actually opened its own marketplace for unused Reserved Instances last month, it seems like a tool for planning these purchases could come in pretty handy.
Besides Reserved Instances, Cloudyn offers a service that includes dashboards and alerts that help companies get deeper insight into their cloud spending and tweak their spending to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth.
I often see Cloudyn lumped in with cloud cost monitoring companies like Cloudability, but Cloudyn is actually focused on helping companies figure out how best to optimize their Amazon Web Services infrastructure at the instance level. Cloudability helps companies get an overview of how much money they’re spending on which services, but Cloudyn is interested in determining how to get the best bang for the buck. Do you have instances that you’re paying for but not using? Could you downgrade some part of a service? Upgrade for a better rate? These are the types of questions Cloudyn wants to answer.
Cloudyn was founded last year in Tel Aviv, Israel. So far the company has disclosed that it has raised $1.3 million from Israeli holdings company Elron Electronic Industries.