ylastic blog

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 :-)

AWS announced CloudFormation for creating complex infrastructures or environments called stacks that are composed of multiple AWS resources working together. Sound exciting? Yep. We think so too. Ylastic just released complete support for managing and monitoring this service, making it that much more easier for you to build your infrastructure in the cloud. Jeff Barr has a nice explanation of some of the CloudFormation basics in his post. Ylastic lets you setup repositories that contain your templates. Currently these are S3 buckets, and support for other kinds of repositories is in the works.

We retrieve all of the templates in your repositories automatically and have them available whenever you need to create a stack from these templates. You can view estimated hourly and monthly costs that will be incurred when you create a stack from a template. The CloudFormation team provides several samples for you to get started, and these are automatically available to everyone. 

View the body of a template to see the structure.

Get a nice visualization of the template if you prefer pictures :-)

Create a stack from a template of your choice. Specify a name for the stack and region. You can even edit the template if you want to make some last minute changes prior to creating the stack. 

Specify any parameters that may be required by this template.

Select the metrics that you want to monitor for this stack.

Choose how you want to receive any alerts generated.

That's it! Click create and CloudFormation will get to work its magic, creating all the resources in the correct order. On your stacks page you can view your stacks and all their associated resources, events, and other info.

Each stack makes available a list of actions that are being taken when the stack is being created. 

Incurred costs for a stack for the current month are displayed along with a total for all of your stacks.

Select a stack to view all associated resources, grouped by resource type :-)

Your instances and db instances will display a sparkline graph of the CPU util over the last 10 min, and load balancers will all display the latency for the last 10 minutes.

Click the sparkline to get complete cloudwatch metrics for the resource.

Click the group heading for a resource to navigate to the respective Ylastic page for that resource so you can dig deeper into it.

Filter the resources and view details where appropriate.

Here is the WordPress welcome page from this stack.

Here is an alert for this stack sent as a DM on twitter.

Stack changes are tracked as part of the normal ylastic audit trail.

A hat tip to Taimur, Reto, Chris and rest of the folks from the CloudFormation team for all their hard work on this new service. We have lots more goodies on the way. Stay tuned :-)

AWS continues to provide innovative pay-as-you-go infrastructure services, and we find more and more uses for them. Ylastic is built and run entirely on AWS, so we tend to rack up the expenses between production, and the various development and testing environments. But we do keep a close tab on our AWS spending, especially EC2 which is the largest component of our expenses. Ylastic helps us keep an eye on our spending on Ylastic. Here is a sampling from the spending analytics for one of our testing accounts for last year - 2010. 

Visualize the division of your spending, so you know where to optimize. Spending too much on EBS snapshots? Maybe you dont need snapshots at such a frequent schedule. 

View spending by region - Most testing happens for this account in US East, hence the skewed spending.

If you are on the go, you can still view and keep track of the spending data on your iPhone, Android or Blackberry6.

Alerts when spending exceeds thresholds set by you? Yep, we got that. Even more spending related analytics on the way :-)

• 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!