This week, AWS announced their new cost management tool: Cost Explorer.

Cost Explorer is integrated with the new AWS Billing Console launched in November, and features reporting, analytics, and visualization tools enabling you to track and manage your AWS costs.

Cost Explorer comes with several pre-configured views, including “Monthly Spend by Service” that allows AWS users to see where the money is going.  Users can identify opportunities to save by changing usage patterns or taking advantage of a service-specific pricing option.  “Monthly Spend by Linked Account” allows enterprises to track spending by Linked Accounts.  Finally, the “Daily Spend” report displays your AWS bill in near real-time.

While this is a good move by AWS, it only solves part of the cloud cost management problem for enterprises.  At issue is the fact that most enterprises will deploy a multi-cloud solution, or any number of private and/or public clouds, typically using many different brands.  So, how do we keep track of those costs?

Cloud cost management solutions must deal with many different types of clouds, and bring together a holistic representation of the cost information.  Enterprises need the ability to view cost information from those who consume the cloud services, to the resources those cloud services actually leverage, as well as all points in-between.  Two other required features are the ability to provide key analytics to monitor trends, such as increasing costs, and the ability to track through the reasons things happen.

There are a few problems that need to be considered:

First, complex services are difficult to measure, in terms of resource usage and costs.  However, they are an integral part of multi-cloud solutions.  What makes these services complex are the granularity of the services, and how the services interact with other services, including any service dependencies.  Enterprises need to understand who’s consuming the services, as well as how those costs track down to the resources they actually bind to the services.

For example, an application may invoke a few APIs for storage services that actually involve aspects of the AWS, Microsoft, and private cloud resources.  You need to understand how all of these things interact in order to understand the true costs metrics.

Second, the tipping point to manually manage resources is long past.  This means the number of services the enterprise manages reached a point where use-based accounting using manual processes no longer works, and this includes just using the AWS cost management solution that was just announced.  This concept also applies to the use of resources that are leveraged by those managed services.

Third, there are too many consumers of the resources, thus it’s difficult to manually track.  Just as we hit the tipping point for services, we also hit the tipping point for service consumers.  There are just too many users and organizations that leverage cloud services to track them manually, which needs to be done for both track-back and show-back cost allocations.

Finally, the lack of usage tracking means little visibility into past usage of resources, cost information, and future trends that should be proactively addressed.  The enterprise cloud manager has no deep understanding as to where the resources are consumed, or by whom, and how much it costs the enterprise.

What’s needed is some system to provide cost visibility, cost analysis, cost accounting, and cost governance.  What’s more, this must happen at the enterprise level, not just for specific clouds.  Holistic and heterogeneous systems need to be put in place to track the costs of cloud services across many brands, and the systems must do so from the point of consumption (such as an application) down to the resources involved (such as storage or a database).

There are solutions on the market that provide this type of cloud cost management and accounting.  Cloud Cruiser is a pure-play cloud cost management provider, and RightScale provides cost management as part of their multi-cloud management solution.  There are a few others on the market, and the cloud providers themselves provide cost management just for their stuff.

This functionality is not optional.  You need cloud cost management technology to be successful in the cloud.  If this is not a part of your enterprise cloud strategy, make it so.