Last week saw the public cloud ecosystem return to business in full force to try and make up for the time lost during the holiday season. Infrastructure-as-a-service kingpin Amazon Inc. led the charge with the announcement of a sweeping price cut for three of its most popular Linux instance types, which now cost five percent less across the board with the exception of deployments running certain commercial distributions of the operating system.

The reduction will translate into significant savings for the increasing number of organizations that are relying on the retail-turned-cloud-giant’s platform to support their operations, some of which are spending well over five digits every month. But while the bill may be growing smaller for Amazon’s customers, it’s only becoming more difficult to manage as they shift more workloads to its cloud in order to take advantage of the low prices. The challenge has given rise to an entire crop of cost control startups that marked a major update of its own against the backdrop of the markdown.

Cloudability Inc., one of the frontrunners in the field, acquired a startup called DataHero Inc.  for an undisclosed amount to get hold of its dashboarding tool, which enables everyday knowledge workers to visualize complex information using drag-and-drop commands. The company plans to integrate the functionality into its cost tracking platform to help customers uncover new ways of reducing their cloud expenses without requiring the help of specially-trained business analysts.

The deal marks Cloudability’s third startup acquisition in so many quarters, a fairly large number considering that the firm is itself only a few years old and has only raised about $16 million in outside funding. Such purchases are more closely associated with large traditional vendors like Oracle Corp., which lived up to its reputation last week by making a strategic acquisition of its own. The company bought out AddThis Inc., a maker of social engagement plugins for websites, in an effort to bolster its cloud-based marketing automation suite.

Photo via Adina Voicu