Amazon CloudWatch is used to monitor several AWS products. Cloudwatch provides various metrics to monitor the user’s instance, the resources as well as the AWS billing. Cloudwatch can send a notification about a particular event. The user can create alerts to send the notifications. CloudWatch monitors the CPU usage and sends a notification if the usage exceeds the specified threshold. AWS CloudWatch also offers a unique feature to stop or terminate an instance when the CloudWatch alarm is triggered.
The present guide demonstrates how to stop an instance if the EC2 instance is not in use. The alarm will be configured to stop the instance when the CPU usage is less than 5% for more than 2 hours. The below mentioned steps are only for an EBS backed instance. For an instance store backed AMI instance, the user can configure the terminate action only.
Reserved Instance : Paying a one-time upfront fee and save in hourly instance running costs.
Spot instance: A user can bid for the unused Amazon EC2 compute capacity and get the instance.
A spot instance helps to reduce the cost of the instance.Amazon EC2 has huge idle computing capacity and AWS allows using this idle computing power to launch an instance at a lesser price than an on-demand instance. The present guide demonstrates how to create a spot instance using the AWS supplied Linux AMI.
Vimeo is one of the leading tools for online video today. Thousands of new videos uploaded every week and stored in AWS S3 Storage. This is a great case study of an implementation of an advanced cost efficient operations.
This presentation was presented by Vimeo cloud architects - Narendra Venkataraman and Peter McArthur at the AWS Summit in NYC 2011. This great knowledge resource for advanced AWS cloud users describes an automation process that uses EC2 on-demand, spot, and reserved instances to perform online tasks i.e. videos uploads and transcoding.
The following presentation was created by Dr. Matt Wood, Senior Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS). It contains relevant information for those considering using Amazon Web Services to build high performance web applications. You will learn about the main building blocks (storage, compute, databases, managed services) for great applications and how to use AWS to support you along the way.
Reserved Instances are a killer feature from AWS cloud that can save 35-55% of your bill and assure capacity utilization. Since AWS requires a 1 – 3 years contract, the challenge is trying to figure if Reserved Instances are right for you and how to execute the move.
Newvem’s Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool analyzes your AWS cloud account and identifies the exact balance of on-demand to reserved of your EC2 instances capacity. We go a step further and track how efficient your Reserved Instances are used and notify you in advance when they’re about to expire.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates cloud computing, commanding 60% of the $2 billion public cloud marketplace. Here we demystify what goes on behind the scenes of AWS usage and show you how you can lower costs and increase availability with Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics.
(This guest post written and contributed by Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies)
Sometimes trying to save money can become costly and complicated.
A case in point is the growing popularity of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) which enable users to obtain spare cloud capacity in anticipation of future use.
We use EBS volumes for persistent storage. To ensure we do not lose data and take backup regularly, AWS provides mechanism to take snapshot. Learn more on how to snapshot an EBS volume. In this guide, we will show, how to automate snapshots for an AWS EBS volume by schedule an automatic cron job. We will use Linux instance and see how to automate the snapshot using cronjobs.
Amazon Web Services recently announced their new marketplace where AWS customers can buy and sell Reserved Instances to other AWS customers.
