CloudHealth Launches Container Module Support for Amazon ECS

Keeping cloud costs under control can be a challenge, and once you bring containers into the mix, wrangling your IT budget can become harder.

To address this, Boston-based SaaS company CloudHealth Technologies has launched in general availability Container Module support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). CloudHealth Container Module helps customers gain more visibility into their container usage and resource spend, and supports Kubernetes, Mesos, and now Amazon ECS.

The platform ties in data from disparate environments so businesses can have a single pane of glass to see resource utilization, allocation and spend in multi-cloud environments. With the CloudHealth Container Module, customers can see data from Amazon ECS deployments that help them assign costs, understand consumption patterns for capacity planning, and optimize resource clusters to reduce waste.

“A lot of our customers are using containers to allow density of compute to get the best economics from their underlying infrastructure,” CloudHealth founder and CTO Joe Kinsella told ITPro Today. “We’ve seen rapid growth of containers and specifically Amazon ECS.”

A survey last year by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) showed an uptick in Amazon ECS usage as on-premises container deployments dropped. 

Containers can be tricky when it comes to tracking and managing spend because you have clusters that run tasks, and each task may consume a fraction of underlying resources. Kinsella said that the math can get complicated when you try to track how much a specific team or project consumed and how much it cost.

“It's added a level of complexity we didn't have in the cloud,” he said.

With containers and Amazon ECS, Kinsella said he often sees customers over-provisioning, using oversized underlying clusters relative to tasks, or misconfiguring by overusing some instance types.

“These two challenges make it so customers spend more than they need to,” he said.

As IT pros are tasked with understanding the business value of IT decisions along a digital transformation journey, Kinsella said that they have become more financially aware, and platforms like CloudHealth can help them do that.

“You can’t just be a technologist, you need to understand the surrounding business and business outcomes,” he said. “You need to understand the costs of what you’re doing, and how it is going to grow or change over time.”

While there are other tools that allow companies to access this information, Kinsella said the CloudHealth platform provides one place for users to see inside of their data center, across multiple public clouds, and managed containers.

“As demand for our customer data platform continues to grow, so does our use of Amazon ECS,” Tido Carriero, VP of Engineering for Segment, a CloudHealth Technologies customer said in a statement. “With CloudHealth, we gain unprecedented visibility into our container environment, which enables us to optimize our clusters and significantly reduce spend on an ongoing basis.”

CloudHealth raised $46 million in a Series D funding round led by Kleiner Perkins last year.