Product availability: Beta version in mid-September

Why it's worth watching: Cloudfloor wants to help you maximize the efficiency of your cloud services, no matter how you define it.

"The concept of efficiency is different for everyone," explains Imad Mouline, the co-founder and CTO of Cloudfloor, which raised $3.1 million in Series A funding from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and Dolphin Equity. "We'll help you analyze tradeoffs between measures such as cost, performance, resiliency and regulatory restrictions for all your applications."

The good news about Cloudfloor, says Mouline, is that its CloudControl offering can provide users with key analytics without deploying any code onto their machines. Rather, users only need to log in to Cloudfloor's portal and check out their metrics. Cloudfloor pulls a lot of its metrics from aggregators such as Google Analytics and Amazon AWS and then organizes it to give users their desired metrics for how they want their cloud services to perform.

From there, users can tell Cloudfloor what their goals are and then let the system shape traffic to meet those goals. So for instance, if your top goal is performance and resiliency, you can have CloudFloor assess more bandwidth and resources to a particular area in a region where you expect to get heavy traffic and even help you pool cloud resources from multiple vendors to get the job done. On the other hand, if your first goal is saving money, then you can have CloudFloor shut down any servers in areas that are not hitting certain traffic requirements and are thus unnecessary to maintaining operations. And if your goal is to balance performance and cost, you can shape traffic to send a certain amount of traffic initially through your own private and then send it out to the cloud once it reaches a certain level, thus minimizing both the strain on the data center and the use of cloud infrastructure.