Billing access to AWS IAM users

Exciting news - AWS Identity and Access Management enables password management and IAM user access to account billing information

AWS Identity and Access Management enables password management and IAM user access to account billing information

We are excited to announce the following new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) features.

• Customers can now grant IAM users direct access to the Account Activity and/or Usage Reports pages without having to give them access to other AWS resources.

• Customers can now define an account-wide policy in the IAM console that enforces password strength for their IAM users upon password changes.

• IAM users can now use a simple graphical user interface in the IAM console to change their password.

To learn more, visit the Using IAM guide.

private, virtual or public

public it is.
its exciting always to talk to prospects on how their cloud strategy is trending. Invariably most are sold on AWS services , irrespective of new strategy changes like Zynga a.k.a zCloud which more or less depends on how big your cloud is & future projections.


keeping the same in mind Attribo Insights will move towards integration with OpenStack & VMWare primarily to give you a single window pane to measure & govern your on premises or public cloud.


End of the day the better informed you are the better you will succeed & we are passionate to make it happen for you.

Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

better insights 

Earlier today, GigaOM published a cost comparison of self-hosting vs. hosting on AWS. I wanted to bring to your attention a few quick issues that we saw with this analysis:

Lower Costs in Other AWS Regions - The comparison used the AWS costs for the US West (San Francisco) Region, ignoring the fact that EC2 pricing in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) is lower ($0.76 vs. $0.68 for On-Demand Extra Large Instances).

Three Year Reserved Instances - The comparison used one year Reserved Instances, but a three year amortization schedule for the self-hosted hardware. You save over 22% by using three year Reserved Instances instead of one year Reserved Instances, and the comparison is closer to apples-to-apples.

High Utilization Reserved Instances - The comparison used a combination of Medium Utilization Reserved Instances and On-Demand Instances. Given the predictable traffic pattern in the original post, a blend of High and Low Utilization Reserved Instances would reduce your costs, and still give you the flexibility to easily scale up and scale down that you don't get with traditional hosting.

read full blog at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/be-careful-when-comparing-aws-costs.html

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Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the trailblazing provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has changed the dialog about computing infrastructure. Today, instead of simply assuming that you’ll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking, AWS is always an option to consider, and for many new businesses, it’s simply the default choice.... more 
http://gigaom.com/2012/02/11/which-is-less-expensive-amazon-or-self-hosted/

Cloud Insights & Governance

 What started as a curiosity has become a must have for plenty of mid to large companies. Start-ups are sold on the cloud story & in fact they see the benefits of using public cloud already. Amazon has been the key here with their AWS services. So be it virtual machines or elastic storage , we all are already hooked to it deeply.


Got an opportunity to interact with my fellow entrepreneurs & exciting to see the need for a holistic & simple to use Insights platform which can hook into your infrastructure of choice & make your day to day business life manageable & cost effective.


With regards to the same very happy to share with you more details about our Cloud Insights & Governance solution. Feel free to reach out to me on vinod at attribo or you can keep an eye on us via twitter @attribo


Would love to hear your thoughts on the same & also to simplify your cloud strategy for sure.

is accountability a key to better cloud visibility

have been lately coming across plenty of prospects who complain about visibility & cloud accountability. To greater extent its true as your scaling out needs grow & there has to be a scale out accountability & reasoning as to why , when , by whom, & for how long have to be monitored on a regular basis.


so here we go again & love the fact that we are on right side of the chart but hey feel free to ping me on vinod at attribo dot com , would be glad to discuss as to what aspect of cloud is bothering your business needs. Is it manageability, billing, budgeting, automation, reporting, integration, acl/roles, image certification , backups, security or failover

Reduce 'Ex' off your cloud CAPEx & OPEx

Food for thought. 'Ex' is really becoming an area of discussions lately. Given we all are possibly heading towards a milder market it makes sense to be geared up to analyze our spend patterns on cloud.


Brainstorming on various aspects , especially :


1. Budgeting & Quota
2. Actionable Analysis
3. Finer Access control
4. Time bound life cycle control of virtual resources
5. Co-relate vendor billing to activities on your vendor account

Cloud Cost Optimization, a real deal?

Cloud Cost Optimization is gaining momentum & excited to mention Attribo Cost Control Center in this context. Cloud is moving beyond manageability & on-demand usage pattern. Its more serious now in terms of businesses running entirely on Amazon & other vendors.


This is adding a pressing need for a Cost Analysis tool to bubble up the unknowns & help project costs involved with selecting a public IaaS like Amazon.


Plenty more to be announced here.