One click, and Amazon shows you all your spending on its cloud

The biggest public cloud out there, Amazon Web Services, has just come out with a new way to keep an eye on all the money people spend on it.

Amazon executives revealed the company’s new Cost Explorer at the AWS Summit event in Sydney last night.

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With a single click, Cost Explorer loads up data on how much people have spent in the current month, and it also brings up information on the past four months of spending, according a blog post about the new tool. And it’s even possible to hone in on spending for the current day. You can visualize the data in various ways and export it for further analysis elsewhere.

Amazon is essentially widening out its portfolio here, potentially creating tension with partners that peddle software for tracking how much companies pay out for that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It’s another bell and whistle Amazon can use to keep its customers comfortable right where they are and make them think twice about moving to another cloud service.

But not everyone in the cloud-spending business is spooked.

“I’ve … never seen a vendor make a decent management product,” Mat Ellis, founder and chief executive of cloud-management tool Cloudability, told VentureBeat via email. “It’s a bit like expecting Chase or Wells Fargo to come out with a competitor to Great Plans or Oracle Financials.”

Altogether, the new Cost Explorer isn’t a big deal to Cloudability, Ellis said.

Google, meanwhile, has been boosting cost-tracking capabilities for its Google Compute Engine public cloud. Google also recently announced a tool to estimate costs of running applications in the Google cloud — something Amazon has been able to do for some time now.