In September, Amazon Web Services launched a marketplace for reserved instances — a contracted, fixed-term version of its cloud infrastructure. Cue the analytics startup.

InstanceVibe.com, a two-week old baby of a website launched by Roman Stepanenko, offers analytics and alerts to prospective buyers in the reserved instances marketplace.

“Generally, each company has a preferred timeframe for the amount of time they want to have an instance. Especially with the startups, if you want to have a reserved instance, you have to pay some cash up front,” he explains. “If you want to find perfect instance for your needs, you need to keep logging into the AWS console. [The] natural solution is to supply some sort of alert where you supply the criteria to what you’re interested in and you’re notified by email.”

Stepanenko, a former financial services developer who founded structural exception search engine BrainLeg in April, said he bought the domain right after he saw Amazon’s announcement. The website launched two weeks ago. He got the idea for the site from his own experiences with the reserved instances marketplace.

InstanceVibe users set a certain criteria for the type of instance they want to find, including the amount of time they want on the contract and the amount of usage. The marketplace is scanned by InstanceVibe regularly and alerts are sent out to users when instances are available with their criteria.

Alerts are free for t1.micro instances. Costs scale up to $9.99 for two weeks and $14.99 for four weeks of unlimited alerts for any instance. Each time the marketplace is scanned, the data is stored in a historical prices database and analyzed to show the best possible prices over a certain amount of time. Those analytics are free.

“Every time I scan the marketplace I am saving these data points in my database and that allows me to analyze when instances are sold and when they become listed,” Stepanenko said. “I can calculate the best costs of ownership historically [based on the information].”

Read more from Adam Riglian on SearchCloudApplications.com. Follow him on Twitter @AdamRiglian

The cloud applications tide has been rising for some time and it’s beginning to raise the boats in a spinoff IT sector – cloud application performance management.

A slew of vendors are popping up offering services to monitor EC2 spending, bandwidth, network performance, application performance and other advanced metrics. AppNeta, a Boston-based company located in the city’s growing “Innovation District,” is one of those vendors. Today, it released AppView Web, an addition to its PathView Cloud platform that will monitor app performance on the public cloud and offer insight into an apps performance over a network.

CEO Jim Melvin sees AppNeta as a way for users to increase the reliability of public cloud applications. He describes a common occurrence in IT departments – Salesforce.com is running slow in the office, IT calls Salesforce to ask why and they tell them that everything is running normally in the Salesforce data center. Melvin says this constitutes a typical call to AppNeta, which issues automated responses to IT through alerts, dashboards and reports that explain when the problem is on their side of the fence.

“If companies are looking to move towards public web applications, like Salesforce, like Google Docs, like a backup system like a mail system, they cannot take the plunge without some level of assurance, and that’s what we offer,” Melvin said.

Public clouds do have failures, as evidenced by recent outages in Amazon and Salesforce, but Melvin said that downtime in the office is often caused by network glitches or by inefficient use of resources. He describes two common examples – quality of service errors and BYOD.

Quality of service describes the way applications get prioritized on the network. Melvin says it is relatively common for a router to go down and be brought back up without anyone noticing, but that when new routers come online, they aren’t wired to respect quality of service, which creates a logjam.

The BYOD era adds an extra layer of confusion to the process. Anyone firing up their iPad in the office may inadvertently begin synching all their applications, from work-related apps to iTunes, soaking up a huge amount of bandwidth that takes away from apps in the cloud.

When asked what percentage of problems AppNeta respond to are caused by human error, Melvin estimated close to 90%.

“IT infrastructures are just incredibly resilient, they almost never completely fail because they are so dynamic,” Melvin said.

The market for performance management appears to be growing based on all the product news that has come out on an almost daily basis. Riverbed Technology announced a product upgrade that adds capabilities around quality of service today.

For more on application performance management (APM), check out contributor Crystal Bedell’s story on SearchSoftwareQuality.com.

Enterprises searching for the benefits of platform as a service but uncertain over what cloud models to pursue are being given a new option.

AnyCloud, a Java platform as a service released yesterday by CloudBees, can be deployed in any cloud environment, public or private, as well as in on-premise data centers. Enterprises with regulatory and compliance concerns, especially in the European market, are now allowed greater control over what data goes into the public cloud, what stays on-premise and what geographic region an application runs in.

“We’ve talked to a lot of customers and we have enterprises using our stuff and there are some barriers of adoption to PaaS in the enterprise – people can’t get all their apps into the cloud, they can’t get their data out there,” said Steve Harris, senior vice president of products at CloudBees. Harris said that people are forced into a “false dilemma” between having to go all in on public or private cloud.

AnyCloud does not need to be installed in a data center like other PaaS models. Instead of installed PaaS software managed in one data center, AnyCloud’s stack is managed remotely across any environments – cloud or on-premise — that are being used. Applications can be deployed in any environment, with the technical issues of integration handled on the back end.

“When you deploy an application, you bind the services you are going to use and those services have resources and so on,” Harris said. “That communication is done under the covers through a service bus approach.”

Harris stresses that CloudBees is avoiding overusing the term “hybrid cloud,” instead focusing on delivering the platform as a service

“There are solutions for private cloud infrastructure so you can more easily use resources in an elastic manner at an infrastructure level,” Harris said, adding that in many cases all private cloud amounts to is virtualization with a better user interface.

Harris emphasized that part of the goal of AnyCloud is to eliminate the thinking that enterprises have to take an all or nothing approach when it comes to cloud. He uses security as an example.

“I think it helps to address [security] in the sense that your existing resources, your existing policies that you have in terms of security can be more easily meshed with a cloud-based approach, a PaaS approach, rather than it sort of being all or nothing,” he said.

– By Adam Riglian