ylastic blog

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

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.

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 :-)

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 :-)

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 :-)

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 :-)

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 :-)

Ylastic now supports both SSL termination and sticky polices for your load balancing pleasure. This makes it a breeze to configure your ELB to use SSL connections, and for configuring session affinity or stickiness.

1. Upload your SSL certificates.
   
2. Create a balancer with an HTTPS listener that uses the uploaded SSL certificate.
   
3. Create a session stickiness policy for the ELB if you like.
   
4. Assign the policy to the listener.
   

As simple as can be :-)

Ylastic now provides complete management for Amazon IAM server certificates. These certificates are currently used to provide SSL termination by the elastic load balancers on EC2. 

Upload, update and manage all your SSL certificates in Ylastic along with other IAM entities :-)

Are you a texting ninja that gets their info fixes via short messages? Ylastic can send you AWS alerts via SMS. If you want to receive an SMS on an international number, just append a +CountryCode to the phone number on the settings page :-)