About a month ago we posted a simple AWS Cost Cheat Sheet in PDF format and we got a lot of feedback that people found it very useful. In fact it was downloaded over 30,000 times!

We listened to that feedback, and today we are thrilled to launch an interactive and updated version of the Cheat Sheet. Check it out! 

Here’s what’s new:

• Web based: It’s now a web app, so you can bookmark it, play with it, and we can keep the information up to date. The PDF we previously did was out of date as soon as AWS changed their pricing, which they do regularly.
• Region Selection and Comparison: You can select any region and see the price table change. There’s also a comparison table that shows you the percentage difference between each region.
• Currency Conversion: Select between US $, £ pounds sterling and € euro. We’ll add more as we hear what people want to see.
• Select Time Period: Costs are normally shown in hours, leaving you to figure out how many hours in a day (easy), a month (less easy – how many days do you take? How many do Amazon?!) or a year. Select the time period and we’ll show you the cost for that region, in the currency you wise, for the time you want the server.
• Spot Instance Price and History: Easily see the Spot Price right now, in the region you wish, and also see in that context of historic (since May 2012) average, high and low price.
• Reserved Instances: See the hourly reserved cost, compared to on-demand or spot, and select what type to view (1 or 3 year, light, medium or high) and decide if you’d like to amortize the upfront cost of the life of the instance, reflected in it’s hourly cost.
• Windows or Linux: View costs based on which platform you’d prefer. (We’ll add RDS if there’s demand for it – let me know in the comments)
• Compare Reserved Instances: See the payback time, and the difference in reserved instance types and regions to help you make better purchasing decisions.

The spot price is updated every few minutes, and of course we update the service pricing every time AWS do. If you wish, you can enter your email address and we’ll notify you whenever there is a major price change.

We really wanted to make this a simple place to go to price check the Cloud. Please let us know at support@cloudvertical.com or in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to see added to make this more useful.

AWS Identity and Access Management is a web service that enables Amazon customers to manage users and user permissions in AWS. With IAM, each user is allowed to do only what they need to do as part of the user’s job.

CloudVertical now supports IAM, so you can use it to give us read-only access to your services. It’s really easy to setup:

1. Log into you AWS account: https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/manageYourAccount

2.  Scroll down to the “IAM user access to the AWS Website” section.  Check both checkboxes on the right (“Account Activity” and “Usage Reports”). Click Activate Now button below checkboxes (do it even if the checkboxes were already checked!).

Continue reading “How to setup AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for use with CloudVertical” »

One of the most common issues we hear is that I/O on AWS is hard to predict, and often a bottleneck for applications. So today’s news that AWS have introduced two new ways to improve your I/O performance is an exciting development.

Aside from the performance benefits, these new options also introduce a number of additional cost variables. I’m excited to announce that, on the same day of introduction (as we did we programmatic billing!) CloudVertical now fully supports, analyses and provides reporting for these new EBS and EC2 options!

We thought you might find it useful to get more information on the cost implications, so continue reading to learn about the options, costs and how they differ from existing standard EC2 and EBS resources. Continue reading “Understanding new AWS I/O options and costs” »

AWS today announced that you can get programmatic access to your billing data. Fantastic – this has been a long requested feature! And we are delighted to say we fully support it! (we’ve had a busy day…)

From an AWS point of view – basically you can now get billing data created in an S3 bucket as a CSV file, multiple times per day, which shows your cost month-to-date. What we do is import that data and display it in an easy to approach and meaningful way. We also store historic information so over time you can get more useful analytics.

Aside from parsing the billing data, if you provide IAM credentials with read-only access to your AWS services, we also provide details analytics of your usage and cost, and let you go really deep by tagging everything and running tag and time based filters on any of your data.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of what you get with just the new AWS report from S3:

some more details:

You can set Events and Alerts on billing data – such as summarising total cost for a 24 hour period, or looking at a weekly cost and percentage change over the previous week:

One of the limitations of the new service is that there is no historical data – naturally as you are just enabling it for the first time now, so it’ll take a few days to become really useful, and it’ll take us a couple of hours before any data beginsto appear.

Here’s a summary of what you get: 

- Cost Month to Date
- Projected Cost to End of Month
- Cost Per Service Visual Graph
- Breakdown of EC2 by type of instance, cost, number of hours running (we don’t currently break out instance flavour)

AWS Links:

AWS Documentation

AWS Blog Post

Please let us know if you have any feature requests or feedback!

There’s a number of our larger users that are run BIG jobs on AWS Elastic MapReduce. Since EMR spins up so many EC2 instances as part of the job, and jobs run for varying amounts of time – it can be hard to get a sense for how much a particular job actually cost, and what resources were utilised.

So starting today, we launched an EMR tracker. As you can see in the screenshot below, we use the EMR auto tags to capture all the resources used and show the total EC2 cost, EMR cost and total JOB cost -

there is also a drop down that shows all the EC2 resources used, by instance tag, time running, EC2 cost and EMR cost

You can find by going to usage tab –> compute –> EMR.

This covers most of the EMR costs – we will add S3 shortly too. If you use EMR and want to track what’s happening – signup now and give it a whirl!