Ping is a nice little network utility, and a great way to quickly check connectivity to your EC2 instances and get a feel for the latency by measuring the round trip times. This of course requires that the security group for your instances allow ICMP traffic. If you do have ICMP enabled, you can check ping times to your EC2 instance from 6 locations around the world - San Francisco, London, Sydney, Hong Kong, Moscow and New York, with a click from Ylastic. Here are the ping times to one of our c1.xlarge instances running in the US east region (N. Virginia).

You can even do this from your mobile - iPhone, Android or Blackberry6.

AWS just released a brand new service named the Identity and Access management Service (IAM) intended to be the main way to manage all your users and their security credentials for AWS resources. You can setup groups and assign users to them. Each group or user can be assigned an Access Policy that determines the level of access granted to the AWS resources in your account. Each user has their own set of access keys, so you no longer have to share the same keys between users. Ylastic has integrated IAM and we are excited to release complete support for this new service. :-) Here is an overview of the IAM setup for our demo AWS account.

This overview displays all your groups and the users assigned to them. Users that do not have any access keys are displayed in red. Yep. This chart is automatically generated in Ylastic at the click of a button! The chart is color-coded to make it easy to quickly glean important info. Here are some of the groups and users mentioned in the chart.

You can assign and unassign users from groups easily.

Policies written in the Access Policy Language are the primary way to grant access to resources. You can assign a policy to either a group that contains users or to individual users.  Here is a sample policy that gives access to only the RunInstances operation.

When a user that this access policy applies to makes an API call for any other operations, other than RunInstances, access is denied and an appropriate error message is returned.

You can configure and manage all of these IAM resources from within Ylastic:

• Groups
• Group Policies
• Users
• User Policies
• User Access Keys

We are working on even more tools around IAM, including mobile access from your iPhone, Android or Blackberry. Simplify your cloud management!

Want to do more than just get alerts via email, twitter, jabber, SMS or voice when things happen to your AWS resources and thresholds set by you are breached? Would you like to run some custom scripting, hook up other apps or update your internal dashboard ? Introducing Web hooks for super simple integration and extension of Ylastic alerting. Give us an URL - http or https, and we will post to it when alerts are triggered.

New mobile devices running Blackberry OS6 are beginning to make their appearance around the world. Ylastic already supports the iPhone and Android based phones, and the latest release brings AWS management to the new Blackberry6 devices. So if you are in a corporate environment where iPhones and Androids are not used, check this out!

• Trying to get a handle on your spending for AWS? 
• Want to slice and dice the costs by service to see the distribution of your spending?
• Need a bird’s eye view of your daily costs for a service?
• Want to monitor your costs?
• Get alerts when cost thresholds set by you are crossed?
• You say you also want to view last month’s spending?
• The damage for the whole year?
• And you also want to view them on the go from your iPhone, Android or Blackberry?

We have just the right fix for you. Introducing Ylastic’s latest feature - AWS Usage costs crunched, sliced, diced and delivered to you just the way you want.

Create monitors for costs either for individual services or for all of them and get alerts when thresholds are breached via email, twitter, jabber, or even a voice alert to your phone. Did you say SMS? Ylastic now supports SMS for all alerts. Here’s an SMS delivered to Google Voice!

Get a handle on those cloud costs, and simplify your cloud management. Even more cost related tools coming to Ylastic soon!

The popularity of EC2 has resulted in an explosion in the number of public images or AMIs available for your launching/customizing pleasure. You may or may not want to create a private AMI from every interesting one that you come across. But you do need to be able to find it agan whenever you want without rummaging through all of the public images again and again. Happens to us a lot, so we scratched our own itch, and just added the ability to tag public AMIs to Ylastic. 

You search for an AMI once, and then tag it as a favorite and give it a description if you like. It will be in your Favorite Images list till you untag it.

Select the AMI that you want to copy, click an icon and provide some info. Thats it!  Now go get some coffee or check your twitter feed :-)

Ylastic will create all the required machinery and migrate your AMI. Once the new AMI is ready, you will receive an email notification.

Yep. As simple as that.

• Copy any public EBS backed linux AMI - Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat to a private AMI in the region of your choice.
• Migrate any of your private EBS backed linux AMIs to any region of your choice.

Manage your cloud, the easy way!

Ylastic has complete support for the recently released EBS Cloudwatch metrics.

• View and drill into detailed Cloudwatch data for all your EBS volumes. Select time periods of your choice and view all the metrics on one page. All the times are in the timezone of your choice, not UTC.
  
• View EBS cloudwatch charts on your iPhone or Android. Keeps tabs on those pesky volumes while you are on the go.
  
• Set up monitors for any EBS metrics of your choice. You do want to know what’s happening, right?
  
• Receive alerts via email, jabber, twitter or voice when those thresholds are triggered.
  

Manage your cloud, the easy way !

Ylastic just added tasks for scheduling your EBS backed EC2 instances.

• Start an instance and assign an elastic ip address to it on a schedule.
• Stop an instance on  schedule.

Super simple scheduling for the cloud!