Attribo Cloud Insights : Quick stats so far

It's been a hectic few weeks keeping in sync with our early adopter prospects. Excited to see things shaping up & helping our users on a daily basis.

Thought of sharing  few key stats based on the participation so far & here it is:

1. Availability Zone : Virginia
   Virginia by far leads across. Primary reason we identified  it to be the cheapest & cost effective zone apart from it being the default choice by AWS when one commissions the resources.
   Attribo Cloud Insights offers a scorecard for you to compare regions/zones to figure out if costs can be saved by shifting to a lower cost region. California being the following choice by most & is catching up with Virginia rapidly.
   One interesting point which came across is also because of plenty of AWS dedicated early & growth stage start-ups being on the US-EAST coast. here is a run down for you to consider 

inux/UNIX / Windows

	$0.32 Virginia US East	$0.32 Oregon US West	$0.36 N.California US West	$0.36 Ireland EU	$0.36 Singapore Asia pacific	$0.368 Tokyo Asia pacific	$0.46 Sao Paulo South America
	$0.46 Virginia US East	$0.46 Oregon US West	$0.46 Ireland EU	$0.46 Singapore Asia pacific	$0.46 Tokyo Asia pacific	$0.5 N.California US West	$0.6 Sao Paulo South America

1. VM Config/Type : m1.large
   By far m1.large is being used in most production environments. Sometimes it seems to be an over provisioned choice but hey gives a little buffer to suffice for any spikes.
   c1.medium config recently added by amazon is catching up on this front & seems a reasonable choice by most. 7GB is a sweet spot for most web apps those can be put in production till one gets TC coverage or has stable spikes. But hey who cares AWS has plenty of options to scale out on-demand.
   
   

   Large

   4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
   Instance 7.5 GB of memory
   850 GB of local instance storage
   64-bit platform
   High
   m1.large
   
   Here is a cost comparison for Large instance for UNIX/Windows
   
   
   
   Linux/UNIX
   

   $0.32/hr

   $7.7/d | $53.8/w | $215.0/m | $2580.5/y

   
   

   $0.46/hr

   $11.0/d | $77.3/w | $309.1/m | $3709.4/y
   
   Windows
   

   $0.46/hr

   $11.0/d | $77.3/w | $309.1/m | $3709.4/y

   
   

   $0.6/hr

   $14.4/d | $100.8/w | $403.2/m | $4838.4/y

1. 
   
2. Architecture : 64 Bit
   Its been proposed by all & most are aware of the benefits, we still found plenty of 32 bit VM's being in use. Im sure all have a plan to move over to 64-bit. primary reason also would be to support SMART SIZING on-demand & it can be achieved with 64bit one's only

More as we progress. 

- Vinod 

From pay-per-use to pay-per-abuse

Pay-per-use rocks!
I'm sure we all are already familiar with the on-demand & pay-per-use model as applied to IT. Is has been of tremendous help while executing your IT strategy & has saved you in $1000s by now. No new hardware to be commissioned or salvaged, compute & storage is being ordered as we order pizza for lunch. You select a topping, crust, flavor & boom its ready within few seconds.

This new age consumption model has given choice & power directly in hands of everyone with-in your business & depending on long request/approval cycles are monsters in the past now.

On the hind-side it has bought in a new issue in terms of  resources being used & paid on an hourly basis & is leading towards a Pay-per-abuse issue. Recently had a conversation with few key IT decision makers & the first & foremost point they wanted to discuss was to "How to curtail & control" resources abuse.

Remember you are paying by hour & if your team is not proactive enough you could end up paying good amount of your budget which could have been optimally used elsewhere. With high end compute available in seconds its easy to spring up as many virtual resources.

Sure you will get details of it at the end of month but that's too late already.

Glad to introduce Attribo Cloud Insights to you & you are welcome to see by yourself if it applies to your Cloud IT.

- Vinod 

Operational Insights

Its becoming apparent that having part of your business deployed on Amazon AWS is slowly eating up on your teams time elsewhere. The on-demand paradigm is finally coming to age & hence a need for a tool to occupy this gap. Operational Insights is not a buzzword anymore its the reality for anyone managing their stack on Amazon AWS. With virtual resources growing at a rapid pace, its hard to have a single consolidated view into what, where, who & why.

Cloud Cost an issues for all?

"But the published pricing model didn't make many waves because few bothered to do the math."
http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/platform/231600672

It has been 3-4 yrs since we all have started deploying & using IaaS stack to suffice different business use cases that we have. Though cloud has been a proponent for on-demand virtual resource utilization it is becoming apparent that it adds up to a huge cost once your deployments become serious & more dedicated.

Came across this article which bubbles up the same with GAE though same pattern is becoming obvious with other vendors like Amazon/Rackspace & more.

Good news, Attribo is spearheading in this direction & soon will announce GA for Attribo Cost Control Center for one to have a much clear & more actionable cost control strategy.