Ylastic now supports management, monitoring and alerting for the recently introduced Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Set up and scale those MySQL based databases in the cloud easily:

• Manage DB instances.
• Manage DB parameter groups for configuring your database.
• Manage DB security authorizations.
• Manage DB snapshots and restoration of new DBs.
• View all DB events logged by RDS.
• View pending changes to your databases.
• Monitor your databases by setting thresholds and getting alerts when they are triggered - email, twitter, jabber and voice.
• Easily view and zoom into your DB cloud watch metrics to look at the data you want.

Here is the complete list of features. Cheers!

AWS released a nice little feature last week that did not seem to get much attention or fanfare on the internet. EC2 auto scaling groups can now span across multiple availability zones. This enables some additional niftiness for your EC2 fleet:

• High availability by balancing a group of auto scaled EC2 instances spread across multiple Availability Zones.
• Avoid insufficient capacity errors automatically by letting AWS rebalance your autoscaling group in an availability zone with capacity.

Ylastic lets you leverage this feature for your auto scaling groups:

• You can create auto scaling groups which span multiple zones.
• You can expand your existing auto scaling groups to additional zones.

Ah, auto scaled EC2 instances spanning multiple availability zones behind an elastic load balancer :-)

Ylastic now has a simple way for you to schedule tasks on AWS. Pick a task and specify how you would like it scheduled:

• At a certain time : Lets you run a task once at a specified time, for instance October 31, 10:00.
• Every so often : Lets you run a task forever at the specified time interval, for instance every 30 minutes, 2 hours or 10 days.

In this initial release, you can schedule two kinds of tasks:

• Launch an instance from a launch configuration.
• Snapshot EBS volumes.

This covers a lot of common tasks that you can perform in a scheduled manner on AWS such as run reports daily, run periodic tasks such as processing log files, snapshot your data volumes, etc. We are adding more tasks as we go. You can view a list of all your tasks, including the last time a task was run and the status from that run. If there are any errors while running the tasks, the error will also be displayed on the tasks page.

You will also receive an email notification if any errors are encountered while running your task.

Creating and editing a task is simple, and we have tried to make the entire process/UI easy and intuitive. In the screenshot below, you are setting up a scheduled task to “Launch an instance from launch configuration named Reports in the US region at 2009-10-20 15:28”.

One more way to simplify your workflow in the cloud!

Tired of typing in AWS account numbers when sharing your EBS snapshots? Looking for a clean interface that gives you all the information about your snapshots without tying yourself into knots? Want an easier way to share/unshare EBS snapshots with other users? Finding it hard to differentiate between your private and shared snapshots? Ylastic now supports an easy to use interface for sharing snapshots in both EU and US regions. You can setup easy to remember aliases for AWS accounts and then use them when sharing and unsharing snapshots. You can also view, search and create volumes from public datasets.

Manage your cloud, the easy way!