You have all your domains nicely imported into Route53 using Ylastic. You have scheduled backups of your zones to the S3 bucket of your choice for DR using Ylastic. You do have those zones backed up, right? You can view an audit trail of all the changes/additions/updates being made to your zones in Ylastic. And now you can view the spending break-down for all of those zones in Ylastic Plus. View the spending for the current month, previous month, curent year or the last year.

Easily view the cost associated with each of the zones you are hosting in Route53. The chart also displays the total number of queries made for the displayed zones in the chosen time period.

More integrated cool tools for Route 53 in the pipeline. Manage your AWS cloud, the easy way!

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You can now migrate Amazon Linux based AMIs between regions of your choice in Ylastic. Select your AMI, the region you want to migrate to, and that's it.

Get an email when the migration is completed.

Launch an instance at your leisure from the new AMI and off you go.

Enjoy and happy holidays!!

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Refreshed our auto scaling support to include all of the recent features released by AWS. Here is a quick run through of the various things that you can do with auto scaling on EC2.

Create auto scaling groups with a new easy to use wizard that also lets you set up policies and their associated alarms for scaling up/down your EC2 fleet.

View and manage all of your resources  associated with the scaling groups. 

Suspend scaling processes to investigate any configuration issues with your app and resume scaling processes when you are done.

Create and manage scaling policies and their associated alarms to setup the thresholds for scaling your fleet of instances.

Setup scheduled scaling actions to increase/decrease the number of instances in your fleet. You can also setup the scaling action to be recurring on a schedule of your choice.

Peruse cloud watch charts of group metrics for the scaling group of your choice.

You can still manage your auto scaling groups that are using the trigger mechanism that has been deprecated by AWS. 

More goodies on the way. Enjoy :-)

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AWS has discovered a bug in their software that cleans up EBS snapshots in the EU West region. They are contacting customers that have snapshots affected by this bug. Here is the email that some of our customers are receiving:

Hello,

We've discovered an error in the Amazon EBS software that cleans up unused snapshots.  This has affected at least one of your snapshots in the EU-West Region.

During a recent run of this EBS software in the EU-West Region, one or more blocks in a number of EBS snapshots were incorrectly deleted. The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process. This process compares the blocks scheduled for deletion to the blocks referenced in customer snapshots. As a result of the software error, the EBS snapshot management system in the EU-West Region incorrectly thought some of the blocks were no longer being used and deleted them. We've addressed the error in the EBS snapshot system to prevent it from recurring.

We have now disabled all of your snapshots that contain these missing blocks. You can determine which of your snapshots were affected via the AWS Management Console or the DescribeSnapshots API call. The status for any affected snapshots will be shown as "error."

We have created copies of your affected snapshots where we've replaced the missing blocks with empty blocks. You can create a new volume from these snapshot copies and run a recovery tool on it (e.g. a file system recovery tool like fsck); in some cases this may restore normal volume operation. These snapshots can be identified via the snapshot Description field which you can see on the AWS Management Console or via the DescribeSnapshots API call. The Description field contains "Recovery Snapshot snap-xxxx" where snap-xxx is the id of the affected snapshot. Alternately, if you have any older or more recent snapshots that were unaffected, you will be able to create a volume from those snapshots without error. For additional questions, you may open a case in our Support Center: https://aws.amazon.com/support/createCase

We apologize for any potential impact this might have on your applications.

Sincerely,
AWS Developer Support

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You have an EBS instance running in US east region. But you want to migrate this instance to an AMI in EU, for disaster recovery, testing, whatever. And you say want to do this simply and without major contortions, preferably via a GUI. We hear you :-) Ylastic now has the ability to migrate an EBS linux instance to an AMI in a region of your choice. Pick a few options, and click a button.

And receive an email when the migration is complete :-)

Enjoy :-)

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Ylastic can now backup all your Route53 hosted zones to S3. Each of your hosted zones will be exported to BIND zone file format and saved to the S3 bucket of your choice. Sounds complicated? How about as simple as select the zones to backup, pick a bucket and click a button.

We love simple, so we extended it to also give you the ability to schedule your Route53 backups on a recurring time period of your choice :-)

Manage your AWS environment, the easy way!

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Route53 introduced a new feature that lets you configure DNS based balancing between EC2 regions. Yes, you heard that right. Between EC2 regions. How does this magic happen? By leveraging a new R53 concept called Weighted Alias resource records, that let you define multiple mappings between your zone apex and your ELBs, as well as assign weights to the mappings.

This works great, but do keep in mind that this is a round robin scheme and may not be suitable for all kinds of apps. This is a great start, and looking forward to more neat stuff from the route53 team. Enjoy :-)

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This blog post is outdated. Route53 has since released new features and Ylastic has integrated them. Please check these posts for the updates:

• http://blog.ylastic.com/weighted-round-robin-balancing-between-ec2-re
• http://blog.ylastic.com/weighted-resource-record-sets-with-route53

AWS just released a nice feature named zone apex association for mapping the apex of your hosted zone in Route 53 with an elastic load balancer. No more jumping through various hoops and redirects to make queries for a domain such as xanthe.us resolve to your wonderful ELB in EC2. The magic all happens using the concept of Alias Resource Record Sets, which are aliases that point to DNS names in any Route 53 hosted zone. And here's how easy it is to set it up with Ylastic.

Enjoy :-)

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Route53 now gives you the ability to balance request load by configuring a DNS record to return one of multiple possible answers according to some defined weighted round robin policy :-) Here is how one would setup three A records for the sub-domain www.xanthe.us with weights of 1, 1, and 3 (sum = 5). Route 53 will then select each of the first two resource record sets one-fifth of the time, and returns the third resource record set three-fifths of the time for all queries for www.xanthe.us. And how do we set this all up in Ylastic?

Yep. As simple as that. 

Enjoy :-)

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Ylastic now supports migration of EBS backed Windows 2008 server AMIs between EC2 regions. Select the AMI you want to migrate and pick the right kind of Windows. That's all you need to do :-)

Go get a cup of coffee and browse the interwebs (windows migrations typically take twice as long as the svelte linux ones). Once the migration is complete, you will get an email. Or you can check its status on the migrations page if you like.

Launch the newly migrated AMI, and remote desktop into it.

Windows migration without the migraine :-)

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Announcing spending analytics for all your CloudFront distributions integrated into the comfort of your Ylastic dashboard. Spending charts for the current month, last month, last year and current year.

View spending by regional data transfer. 

By the type of requests being made for your content.

You can also view spending by content delivery type and yep, by distribution. Want to check out summaries of your CloudFront spending analytics on your mobile phone? We got that too.

Enjoy :-)

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Ylastic can now migrate your XFS based images and snapshots between regions. To demo this migration, we used the wonderful new git server AMIs from Eric Hammond and Alestic. 

You get an email once the migration is complete. You can check the migrations page too for the current status. Launch the new AMI, and a few minutes later, here's the console output.

Migration with a single click :-)

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Since the recent AWS outage, we have been getting a lot of requests for migrating snapshots between EC2 regions. Here we go - super simple migration of your snapshots. 

Select a snapshot, provide a description, and click a button. Ylastic will migrate the snapshot and send you an email once the process is complete.

Windows EBS snapshot support as well as multi-partitioned filesystem support in the works. Enjoy :-)

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In the midst of all the recent EC2 excitement, we released an easy to use point and click wizard for creating your IAM policies along with the ability to setup repositories for storing them. This will greatly simplify your workflow when setting up and using IAM policies. Currently you can use S3 buckets as policy repositories, and we are also adding support for other kinds of repositories.

Select your repository and you can create a new IAM policy using the wizard. You create statements and then generate a policy from it.

Select the actions for your policy. We have separated the actions by category for EC2 so it is easy to find what you need :-)

Specify a resource if you like.

Add any optional conditions to apply to this statement.

Click to add this statement. You can add more statements and when you are ready, generate a policy from these statements.

Provide a name for this policy file so we can save it to your repository. That's it! Now this policy will be available to you everywhere in Ylastic that you need access to it.

So if you need to assign this policy to one of your IAM groups or users, click the assign policy button and select it!

SImple and easy to use IAM management :-)

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Dragon Hunt - http://twitter.com/ylastic

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AWS just announced $NAME a very cool, web scale service. Ylastic is releasing complete support for managing and monitoring this wonderful new service. 

We are also working on adding support for a $NAME implementation from existing AWS components. Details and analysis are available from Shlomo Swidler.

Enjoy :-)

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Ubuntu is a very picky about the kernels used in EC2, especially starting with Lucid Lynx. This makes migration between regions a bit painful as you need to know the right kernel to use (32 or 64 bit) when you migrate an AMI between different regions. In Ylastic, we have a simple gui based migration, but you had to pick a kernel in the target region for any recent ubuntu based AMI in order to launch the migration. Not any more :-) We now automatically pick a kernel that will work for your migrated AMI in the target region.

You just need to make sure you pick the right flavor of Ubuntu :-)

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EC2 gives you the ability to assign meaningful metadata to your resources using tags, which are simple key-value pairs. We use tags quite a bit here at Ylastic, and needed a way to do tagging for multiple resources across all regions. We also wanted something that was easy on the eyes, and reduced the drudgery of mass tagging. Tags, something visual, simple to use - Tagcloud! 

The terms in the cloud are displayed in a font that is weighted to visually indicate the number of times it occurs in your tag values. The terms will start moving around the cloud if your mouse is inside the tag cloud, and will stop when the mouse leaves the cloud. Click a value to get a grouped display of all matching EC2 resources with that tag value. Did we mention it will display all matching resources, across all regions? Click a group heading to go to the corresponding Ylastic page for that resource type.

Tag a whole bunch of resources with a click. 

Click a button to edit a tag value and apply the change to all matching resources, across regions. If you have multiple keys with the same value, you can pick the key that you want to change :-)

Removing a tag is as simple as clicking a button.

Tags are very cool, manage them the easy way !

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Ylastic now supports the recently released Tokyo region in APAC for all your AWS resources. This includes management, monitoring, mobile versions, and scheduling tasks. Instead of showing you screenshots of instances, et al. in Tokyo (which you have probably had an overdose of), we are going to highlight another aspect of Ylastic that makes your cloud management easier. Ylastic gives you the choice to manage a single region or multiple regions at the same time. What does that mean, in plain English? You can manage and view all your different AWS resources in APAC (Singapore + Tokyo) at the same time if you like. Yep. That's right. At the same time. No URLs to change to switch between regions. How do you do that ? Just select the two APAC regions on your settings page. That's it !

All the resources you want to manage/configure in APAC (Tokyo + Singapore) - cloud formation stacks, instances, keypairs, etc, in one place. You can even switch between AWS accounts with a click. 

Manage your AWS resources, the easy way :-)

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The fine folks from BitNami released several of their application stacks as CloudFormation templates. You can start using these templates from within Ylastic right away. How easy is it to use them? No copying files, no downloads, no remembering URLs. There is now a new default BitNami template location available on your repositories page.

Select the BitNami location to view all of the available templates, along with estimated running costs.

I am going to run through creating a SugarCRM application from one of these templates. Here is a visualization of this template.

Click the little stack icon to create a SugarCRM stack, provide some basic information, setup monitoring and alerts if you like. Click Create Stack.

That's it! CloudFormation will sprinkle some magic dust and your SugarCRM app will be up and running.

View and drill into all the resources created by this template. 

Click the outputs icon for this stack and it will display the URL generated by the stack for you to access this application.

Click the URL to go to the app start page.

Enjoy :-)

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