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March 14, 2012
 

Scheduling the AWS Account Advisor

You can now schedule the AWS Account advisor in Ylastic to run on a time period of your choice. So you can set it up to run checks against your account, say once a week and alert you via email if any flags are raised by the check. How easy is it to setup?

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You will get an email if there are any warnings from the advisor run.

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Simplify your AWS cloud management!

Filed under  //   EC2   advisor   aws   costs   disaster   rds   recovery   regions   route53   scheduling  

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February 19, 2012
 

AWS Account Advisor

Introducing the Ylastic AWS Account Advisor, a tool for inspecting your AWS environment and identifying opportunities for optimizing your usage of AWS. 

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We built it to be very simple and intuitive to use. You pick the checks you want to include in each run of the advisor (this initial release has a total of ten checks), Ylastic runs the checks and gives you a nice list of things that it found. Each advisor run is saved, and at any time you can review past runs.

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The checks are broadly divided into four categories:

  • Cost Optimization - Opportunities for reducing costs by detecting unused volumes, elastic load balancers, elastic ip addresses and Route 53 zones. These checks will also display an estimated cost saving per month and per year from removing the unused resources.
  • Disaster Recovery - Check your ability to recover from system wide failures by detecting volumes that are in-use but not being backed up to snapshots. The advisor will also flag volumes that have snapshots older than several days, as that may be an indication that the backups are getting stale.
  • Fault Tolerance - Identifies situations that can impact your ability to recover from the failure of an EC2 availability zone, by checking if your elastic load balancers have distributed allocation of instances, as well as if you have instances distributed in more than one zone.
  • Security Audit - Secure access to your resources by detecting security groups that provide public access to sensitive ports or port ranges, as well as S3 buckets that can be listed by anonymous users across the internet.

As you use AWS over time, cruft builds up, and you start having unused resources in your account that are just driving up your costs. One of the cool features of the advisor is to flag these unused resources, and give you an estimate of the savings that you can get if you get rid of them. The screenshot below is from one of our customers that helped us test the advisor. Those elastic IPs, old unused volumes and balancers add up pretty quick :-)

Advisor_9

 

The advisor is a feature available in the Ylastic Plus version. Coming soon, the ability to run the advisor on a schedule, as well as enhancements and additional checks based on feedback from customers that have already been trying this out. 

Enjoy :-)

Filed under  //   EC2   advisor   audits   aws   costs   ebs   elb   rds   route53   s3   security  

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