The days of cloud computing being only for early adopters are long past, as almost half (48 percent) of large organizations have moved an on-premises workload to the public cloud, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. survey. That number is expected to rise to 80 percent by 2018.
But cloud computing, though unquestionably the right choice under many circumstances, can be expensive — even more expensive than the on-premises computing it’s intended to supplement or replace in some cases. Data can grow in size unexpectedly, customers can materialize in unanticipated parts of the world, and renegade users within an organization can suck up processing time in unforeseen ways.
To help remedy those woes, Amazon Web Services has upgraded its Budgets feature, highlighting its ability to provide a unified view of cloud-computing costs and to send automated notifications of over-budget spending.
The updated feature allows setting budgets for each business unit and for an organization as a whole, tracking spending by region, service, department or individual user and comparing actual usage against budgets. Budgets are now evaluated four times a day. The service alerts managers with an email or message when user-set thresholds have been reached, even allowing services to be shut down automatically. It allows analyzing historical costs and using that analysis to plan suitable budgets.
Budgets can be created within the AWS management console, by making calls to the new budget API or by using the AWS command line.
Better budgeting may come at a cost. AWS allows two budgets per account at no charge, with additional budgets (up to 20,000 of them per account) cost $0.02 per day.
Microsoft’s Azure, ranked the number-two public-cloud provider by virtually all measures, offers a pricing calculator to help estimate monthly bills, allows tracking usage and spending, and sends automatic billing alerts if spending exceeds pre-set levels.
