On Channel9, Seth Juarez of Microsoft’s Developer Evangelism showed off an interesting and useful line of business app to help organizations better manage their cloud resources. As a part the Channel 9’s LaunchPad Series for highlighting powerful line of business apps that are built on Microsoft technologies, Juarez spoke with Michael Chadwell of Cloud Cruiser about their app to help IT admins improve their usage and costs of their cloud solutions.
The concept of Cloud Cruiser is to give IT admins a smart meter for delivering insight into how organizations are using their hybrid clouds and a deeper ability to track costs down to specific departments, and even users, within a comapny. The app works to track cloud usage across Azure, Windows Azure Pack, System Center, Hyper-V, Windows Server, and many other public/private clouds.
With the metering information that Cloud Cruiser provides, IT admins are able to improve forecasting, better match the supply and demand of cloud resources, implement showback/chargeback for cloud services, and importantly, be able to compare costs across cloud services based upon their usage data.
This knowledge about how an organization uses its cloud can help IT admins get the right size fit for their cloud solution and improve the management of their IT resources, so you are not paying for resources you don’t use, or are overpaying with certain cloud providers based upon your actual usage data.
To see more about Cloud Cruiser and how the app can help you drill down through your cloud usage data, head over to Channel9’s blog for Bringing Intelligence to Cloud Deployment with Cloud Cruiser and Microsoft Azure to see more.
Could the addition of this app to your cloud infrastructure significantly help you mange your cloud resources? What other kind of tools could help your organization better manage its cloud resources and costs? Let us known in the comments section below.
Further reading: Azure, Channel 9, Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft
