RightScale Tool Aims To Stop Cloud Overspending

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

One of the largest potential savings of cloud computing is the ability to shut off the hourly-charge meter when the server instance isn’t being used. But many users sign up for a cloud server as if they plan to use it every minute of every day for the next year. That’s one finding from the statistics from RightScale’s PlanForCloud, a free tool customers can use to forecast anticipated cloud spending.

RightScale, a front end cloud workload management service, acquired PlanForCloud, an Edinburgh, Scotland, firm, last year and has kept its free online service available at www.planforcloud.com. On July 23, the company announced that PlanForCloud had completed cloud cost forecasting for 9,500 deployments with an expected cloud service use amounting to $1,016,619,975…

In analyzing the statistics behind that amount of cloud use, PlanForCloud found more than half of EC2 customers use Amazon Web Services reserved instances, where the customer pays an upfront fee for a set amount of use, then receives a lower hourly rate. Reserved instances come in three sizes: light, medium and heavy…

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