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.

Shadow IT in public clouds is thriving - BMC-Forrester survey shows

BMC Software and Forrester recently published results of an interesting survey of over 320 Cloud Computing IT leaders.  Key takeaways were:

-  Shadow IT is well and thriving.  The response to a question on "Actual behavior with respect to cloud" showed that 60% allowed both mission critical and non mission-critical applications into unmanaged public clouds.

-  Agility is the prime motivation for business to adopt cloud computing
-  Existing IT complexity is made worse by unmanaged public cloud services
-  Fine grained security auditing and policy based resource allocation are two highly desirable capabilities in cloud computing

Just as Enterprise IT had to deal with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) it is clear that enterprise IT has to deal with shadow IT in public clouds.   Is it time to start calling Shadow IT for what it really is - Business IT?   The findings above leave little doubt that Governance and Control of public cloud environments is a necessary compensating factor wherever Shadow IT is present.
Brian Singer from BMC adds additional perspective on this survey here.

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