Important step with cloud adoption is to manage quick cycles of learning and improvement of the cloud environment. The following presentation brought you by Amazon AWS guys contains great amount of slides including best practices and examples for Continuous Deployment, Optimization and Integration.
Earlier this week Amazon added a new important capability to its CloudWatch– Monitor Estimated Charges Using Billing Alerts. The new feature facilitates the way you can control your on-going costs.
AWS CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS services. CloudWatch exposes operational metrics for Network, CPU, Disk, etc., for EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and other cloud resources. CloudWatch also allows users to import their own metrics and monitor them through the same interface.
CloudWatch allows users to chart the data (two weeks old historical data available), set alarms on thresholds (and receive notifications on them), and control AWS Auto Scaling. Amazon AWS cloud users interact with CloudWatch through the command-line, API, or AWS Web Console.
The New Feature
The new feature is a new set of metrics that can be monitored through CloudWatch, that bring user’s billing information. These new metrics provide an estimate of AWS charges up to the current time: total charges, per-service charges, per-account charges, per-account-and-service charges. All these metrics are to-date estimates of cost, no prediction metric is provided.
Can a cloud vendor Lock-in be good for anyone? Yes, when they are backed up by exceptional successful service delivery.
I’ve talked a lot about vendor lock-in in my previous post - The Devastating Cloud Lock-in on KnowYourCloud resources channel, so I decided to end this round up in a positive way – finally, lock-in can mean something good for both the cloud service provider and the cloud customer.
The following presentation presented by Newvem Analytic service on the Cloud Management IGT forum meetup.
Cloud Management evolved from the traditional Systems Management perception. The cloud changes the way management done - “Monitoring” changes to “Analyze” and “optimizing the cloud environment” is crucial in order to be able to adopt cloud right in order to really benefit from it.
If you still didn’t try Newvem, we invite you to join our beta.
Clouds move fast, and change fast. The advantage is having elastic, fast, and un-planned deployments. However, uncontrolled usage leads very quickly into footprint sprawl – cloud sprawl, overspend and unpredictable behavior. Contrary to VM sprawl, where the virtualization environment provides natural containment, cloud sprawl can be rather chaotic and expensive – exactly for the same reasons we enumerated above: lack of visibility and control, unpredictability, new processes, and different practices.
According to Gartner’s report “Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda”, almost half of all CIOs expect to adopt cloud technologies within the next five years. Not surprisingly Gartner’s analysts expect an extreme increase from 3% to 43% of the IT organizations that will run applications in the cloud. No doubt that most of the IT organizations already adopted SaaS, IaaS adoption is evolving rapidly and PaaS gain momentum.
“CIOs recognize that they need to reposition themselves and IT to support enterprise innovation and growth. However, two issues stand in their way: benefits realization (the achievement of business benefits) and IT skills. Skills are an issue because CIOs rely on bringing skills in from the outside whenever they need to get work done (see figure below). Both issues will prevent IT from reaching full potential unless the CIO addresses them”
