Category

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Newvem Cloud Operations Optimization for Windows Azure. This latest offering empowers Windows Azure users with straight forward visibility into their cloud inventory and usage, enabling better decision making, minimalizing operational exposures, and aligning cloud operations with business objectives.

Built for the Enterprise

Azure offers a natural extension to enterprise IT operations by allowing them to relieve IT resources and prevent bottlenecks.  With this powerful solution, enterprises can respond quickly to market needs with Microsoft’s enterprise-grade reliability. Public Cloud adoption in the enterprise centers on the developers need to provision servers to address the enterprises IT needs as well as meet new demands.

Read more »

The benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds while striving to achieve interoperability values within their systems. This article aims to answer some of the questions that arise when managing cloud workloads.

Read more »

In this post, I will show you how to clean up unused Amazon EBS Volumes and Snapshots.

This is worth doing as quite a collection can build up over time and Amazon Web Services has limits on the number of volumes and snapshots you can store; these limits can be increased, but you have to make a Request to Increase the Amazon EBS Volume Limit.

What are EBS Volumes?

Volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices, with user supplied device names and a block device interface. You can create a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes, or use them in any other way you would use a block device (like a hard drive).

Read more »

Newvem’s Utilization Heat Map enables you to visualize your 30-day cloud usage by hour, region, business activity, and more in a single glance.

Did you know that more than 15% of clouds are underutilized? That’s more than $30M of the $200M in EC2 spend that Newvem has analyzed over the past year! Such a waste but it can be easily remedied with Cloud Utilization Heat Maps!

Read more »

In part one I described the AWS EBS snapshot mechanism. In this part I will drill deeper on how to calculate the EBS snapshot cost. I  will show how to be able to do a rough estimation or even to perform an accurate cost analysis using monitoring tools.

Rough estimation

In order to estimate how large your EBS snapshots will be, you need to know how much your volumes are changing. One way would be to guesstimate,we can use a simple thumb rule that is often used in- backup planning: A typical data volume of a production server changes about 3% a day. Let’s try and calculate the cost. Assuming a 1TB EBS volume, that is 70% full at first. We take snapshots and keep them for 30 days. So, the first full will be taking 700GB (70% of 1TB). For the incremental snapshots we can multiply 30 (days) by 30GB (3% of 1TB) and we reach 900GB. Add them together and we reach about 1.6TB of total snapshot storage. AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3.

Read more »

Cloud computing comes with amazing financial benefits for the organization…assuming it’s done right. In this presentation, Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix explains how a rapid innovation cycle encourages faster returns and a more economic cloud. He posits that lowering the cost of failure will create a more innovative organization and culture – but how?

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Read more »

An AWS spot instance helps to reduce the running cost of the EC2 instance.  The user bids for a spot instance request specifying the maximum price that the user is willing to pay per hour per instance. Once the spot instance request is fulfilled, the instance will continue to run until it is manually terminated or the spot price increases above the maximum bid price. The user is not charged as per the max price; instead the user will be charged at the current spot price in that availability zone. To know the charges for spot instances, Amazon EC2 provides access to a data feed, which details the user’s spot instance usage and pricing every hour.

The present guide demonstrates how to subscribe or delete the spot instances price data feed.

Read more »

A spot instance helps to reduce the cost of the instance.  To use spot instances, the user bids for a spot instance request specifying the maximum price that the user is willing to pay per hour per instance. If the maximum price of the bid is greater than the current spot price, the user’s request is fulfilled and the user’s instances run until terminated or the spot price increases above the maximum bid price. When the spot instance request is canceled, the spot instances that were launched previously through the canceled request do not automatically get terminated. The only time that the spot instance service terminates a running instance is when the spot price exceeds the max bid price. Note that though spot instances can use Amazon EBS-backed AMIs, the user cannot stop and start spot instances launched from an AMI with an Amazon EBS root device.

The present guide demonstrates how to view running spot instances and cancel the request.

Read more »