I am tracking Amazon for 10 years now including retail and especially its cloud.
Also I founded renoun 6 months ago and I thought it will be nice to share articles/news that it helps me to find specifically about in my domain of interest. And since it helps me find and read good content I return by sharing the link to renoun :)
From your feedback I learn that we need to make the experience more focused on the single article we share. Thank you!
This is more a generic OpenStack question. But the way I look at it, OpenStack is the "fabric" that can be used to create a large, distributed IaaS cloud such as Amazon EC2. People are also using it to create on-premise, private clouds. CoreOS on the other side is very much focused on Linux containers (Docker).
My name if Ofir (iamondemand.com) and I work at Newvem. We are still in a beta mode so we provide all our service features for free. We decided to have most of the features that you see today (you MUST try it!) in our freemium package and in the future we will have some advanced premium ones.
I definitely agree with the fact that the "cloud is programmable" and that one of the major challenges is to be able to plan and implement the automation. On the other hand this highly dynamic environment must be controlled in order to be able to track its behavior over time and be able to maintain and improve its rules and automation. In order to do so you must "Know Your Cloud" in matters such as visibility and control. Does that make sense ?
Dan - the cloud market is still immature and I can debate the comparison between the vendors you listed. All of them indeed do cloud costs optimization though the approach and the focus differ. For example Newvem does cost but also check your security and availability performance. Also optimization must take in mind your resources need to keep a redundant and secure environment.
Disclosure - I work at newvem.com and a blogger at iamondemand.com