Aggregating all the clouds

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

One of the biggest problems with cloud computing for small businesses is having little to no clue how much working with a cloud-based infrastructure is really going to cost. A new Linux-based service in its nascent stage will be working to solve that problem, helping IT managers with monitoring existing cloud computing costs, and projecting costs for new cloud providers to find out which one is best for your wallet.

You might be thinking, how hard could it be to track my cloud computing costs? You’ve signed up with Amazon EC2, spun up your instances in the closest region, and you have a fixed monthly cost, right?…

Turns out? Not so much.

The problem with managing clouds is twofold. First, even if you’re using a single cloud provider service, there’s the very real issue of spiking. An application’s load on a cloud can be steady, until there’s an unexpected use case that suddenly sticks you with a bigger monthly bill for which you had originally budgeted. And it might not even be a useful cost… Improperly managed instances can keep right on spinning, racking up the monthly charges like leaving the lights on in a room 24/7…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/294559/aggregating-all-clouds