Microsoft Ending Its Cloudyn Cost Assessment Service This Month -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Ending Its Cloudyn Cost Assessment Service This Month

By Kurt Mackie
06/23/2021

Microsoft is planning to end its Cloudyn cost assessment solution for cloud services on June 30.

A notice regarding Cloudyn's end was tucked into a June 1 Microsoft Azure blog post focused on Azure Cost Management and Billing solution updates. The oblique Cloudyn mention was spotted by Licensing School, a U.K.-based tracker of Microsoft licensing changes. Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers, though, likely got a notice earlier from Microsoft about Cloudyn's end. Microsoft wants to steer Cloudyn users toward using its Azure Cost Management and Billing solution instead.

Microsoft's notice, reading somewhat like an obituary for Cloudyn, offered hopeful prospects for its successor, namely Azure Cost Management and Billing, which already uses some Cloudyn capabilities. Here's how Microsoft put it:

Microsoft acquired Cloudyn in July 2017 to bring a wealth of cost management experience and capabilities to the broader Azure community. Many organizations have known and loved the capabilities Cloudyn brought to the table and now that many of these have been (or are being) integrated into Azure Cost Management, Cloudyn will be retiring on June 30, 2021.

Cloudyn was already at the "deprecation" stage (meaning no more development was occurring) at the end of 2020, according to an FAQ at the Azure Cost Management and Billing landing page. Moreover, Microsoft wasn't planning to provide support for Cloudyn after that deprecation date, which means it wasn't patching it.

Microsoft's plan for Cloudyn is to add its capabilities to its Azure Portal management solution "whenever possible," according to this document.

Cloudyn was a startup when it got bought by Microsoft in 2017. Its services once were used to monitor "over 15 percent of total global cloud spend," Cloudyn had claimed back then. Its CloudDex product used a performance index to assess various cloud services.

Azure Cost Management was commercially released by Microsoft in April 2019. Microsoft later appended "and Billing" to its name, apparently.

Azure Cost Management and Billing is described by Microsoft as a "suite of tools provided by Microsoft that help you analyze, manage, and optimize the costs of your workloads," per Microsoft's document. It also lets users pay their Azure subscription bills. They can download the data that Microsoft used to create its Azure bills, which is seen as helping customers to better optimize their Azure spending. Organizations also can use the suite to set spending thresholds, the document indicated.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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