Dive Brief:

• Amazon Web Services announced it has upgraded its Budgets feature to help businesses better manage cloud budgets and spending.
• Instead of figuring out costs manually, those responsible for cloud budgeting can now get a single overarching view of costs and automated notifications of potential overspending on designated budgets, according to an AWS blog.
• The feature is geared toward project, DevOps and finance managers.

Dive Insight:

AWS’ enhanced feature automatically evaluates budgets four times per day and notifies users of status automatically so they can take corrective action before they run over budget. Companies can also review budgets for each business unit, track spending by region and compare exact usage against budgets.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the main CSPs battling in the ultra-competitive cloud market. Price is often a key consideration for an enterprise, though it can prove difficult for companies to figure out exactly what they are spending and where, especially if they have multiple cloud projects under way. Microsoft offers a pricing calculator to help its customers with similar issues.

Cloud companies continue to push out new features and functions in an effort to gain an edge on the competition. Last week, Google announced several enhancements to its cloud tools, including a refresh of Google Cloud Storage, an expansion its Cloud Platform partner ecosystem and lower API operations pricing.