Amazon Web Services has launched a new way to track spending on its cloud.
Cost Explorer is a tool that gathers data about cloud spending and another sign that Amazon is looking to expand beyond being an online marketplace. Company executives announced the new feature at the Amazon Web Services summit on Tuesday in Sydney, VentureBeat reported.
The tool is intended to be a single-click way to track how much users have spent within the month as well as what was spent in the past four months. Individual days can be pinpointed as well, and the data can be visualized and exported.
"We wanted to make this drop-dead simple to use," Parmita Mehta, AWS technical program manager, said in a company blog post.
Cost Explorer is launching with three pre-set methods: Monthly Spend by Service, which points out ways to save; Monthly Spend by Linked Account, which follows spending through the user's Linked Accounts; and the Daily Spend report, which shows spending as it happens.
AWS, which is the world's largest cloud service, should continue to grow with new tools to track spending, an AWS partner said.
"Cost management continues to be one of the top pain points we hear from the AWS customers we speak to. Given billing is so core to the service AWS provides, I've been surprised AWS hasn't been more aggressive here," said Izzy Azeri, co-founder of Stackdriver told Gigaom in an email.
"Based on the description to do granular filtering and event based cost analysis, I think this can be very compelling to customers. My guess is this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of spend management and optimization tools for AWS."
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