Tag: AWS Cloud Management

A Start-up’s Resolution to Cloud Sprawl Using SaaS-based Cloud Management Platform

Posted on by Rajeev Kumar

As more and more businesses are moving online, cloud is gaining relevance. However, often without the information or expertise on how to control the cloud, businesses are running the risk of cloud sprawling.

Cloud Sprawl, as defined by Techopedia is “the uncontrolled proliferation of an organization’s cloud instances or cloud presence. It happens when an organization inadequately controls, monitors and manages its different cloud instances, resulting in numerous individual cloud instances which may then be forgotten but continue to use up resources or incur costs since most organizations use pay  for public cloud services.”

However, before we get to understand how to prevent or control cloud sprawling we must first understand how cloud works, what challenges you face without the required information, and subsequently how SaaS-based platforms can deliver the required results for your organization.

Cloud-computing helps you, as an organization, to use the internet as your ‘go-to place’ for all your IT infrastructural needs using a web browser. It enables information to be accessed across the organization to build some sense of universal connectivity. SaaS, though similar, takes over the management of this cloud ; while letting you focus on your development of products and services through a web browser with no physical installation needed.

Software as a Service (SaaS) integration and clouds are leading to the increased use of the Internet of Things (IoT). Many organizations are recognizing the need for IoT to save cost and build new revenue streams. However, before we get ahead of ourselves, it is first important to understand the types of clouds that exist; namely, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud.

Determining which type of cloud is best for you will largely depends on the kind of business you run. If you are the kind of organization that wants to go public, a public cloud is best suited for you. Apart from being fairly cheap, it also gives you agility. On the other hand, if security is a major concern for your business, then private cloud may be the answer.

Different Clouds to the Rescue

Private clouds provide you the ability to have compliance checks and higher levels of control over the information in the cloud. Private cloud, on the other hand, comes with the disadvantage of being expensive, and restrictive in terms of the speed at which you can innovate; when compared to a public cloud. Hybrid cloud is a good mix and ideal for large organizations. This gives organizations the ability to have a mix of public and private clouds that help them be more flexible in terms of pricing and workability.

The Real Challenge

Though many organizations are adapting to the cloud platform, often not knowing what combination works best and how to control it leads to a lot of inefficiencies in management. Here are some of the challenges that organizations face while managing their own cloud.

  • Security issues: Security is one of the biggest concerns for an organization that is migrating to a cloud-based solution. Specifically, in cases where an organization is trying to create its own cloud environment, rather than using public ones that come with predetermined checks and balances on the security front. When creating a private cloud network, the organization will have to create its own regulations that have to be met. Organizations will be solely responsible to secure their own data. This will require you, to learn to use the applications efficiently, track apps, and ensure that they are secure. This is a daunting task especially if you do not have the training or the resources to manage it effectively; especially, if multiple cloud instances are involved.
  • Performance management: There are many cloud vendors that provide organizations cloud platforms. Choosing the right one that suits you will determine how well your organization’s cloud performs. Some vendors may give erratic performance and could drain your organization’s resources. Apart from selecting the right vendor, you also need to ensure that you have the tools to track the clouds performance. Monitoring is an important aspect of ensuring that the vendor is not taking advantage and delivering on the Service Level Agreement (SLA) agreed upon by both the parties.
  • Special expertise: Often, when migrating to a cloud-based platform, the IT staff in the organization may or may not have the expertise to handle and manage the cloud environment that it is being migrated to. The workload on the staff increases as they have to comply and learn about the new environment they have to work with.  This also means the staff will need training on agile methodologies, DevOps tools, and working within the cloud management platforms – this would require focused learning on multiple areas including admin, coding and operations. This will require the existing staff to be trained, new staff to be selected with the specific skills and the option to consider the use of third-party plug to help ease things out.
  • Migration difficulties: Sometimes if you decide you want to change your vendor, after taking the all-important decision to go with them in the first place, you can find yourself having trouble migrating from one vendor to another.  This is because the architecture and tools used by various vendors can be very different. Therefore, it becomes vital to pick the right kind of vendor and ensure that you are taking an account of all the migration difficulties you might face, should you decide to move.
  • Cost Efficiency: At the outset it can be said that migrating to a cloud could be a big benefit to the company. However, determining which type of cloud to use can, in the end, influence the economies of scale. Having said that, as you move more services to the cloud, the cost of the cloud rises, not including the cost paid to the vendors. Therefore, managing the cloud and prioritizing the information that sits in it becomes a major company responsibility. Additionally, if you are building your own cloud and not enough people within your organization use it; that automatically increases the cost to the company.
  • Skill shortage: Having the skill to control the fate of your cloud is a very important aspect in cloud management. Skills include technical ones to create or set up the cloud, and management skills to ensure there are no breaks in the service. Small issues in the management of the cloud could result in huge problems for the organization. If you already do not have the technical or management skills, it will be an uphill climb to ensure that the cloud is up and running; leading to lots of frustration within the organization.
  • Time and effort: Though cloud management is getting a lot easier in these times of rapid change, management of the cloud takes a lot of time and effort. If you, therefore, decide to manage your cloud on your own; apart from skill set you will also need to devote time towards its management. This could sometimes translate into hiring a resource to just do that on a regular basis. Especially, in situations when things go wrong; fixing it could be both tedious and time consuming.
  • Technology options: Technology is ever changing; and with it the options available to choose from are multiplying. There are a host of hardware and software options emerging in the market. Even if you do not want the best of the hardware and software, to know the options that are available will take some of your time to keep at the technological growth in the cloud space. Sometimes, the difference between a very expensive solution when compared to a not so expensive one could be a minor change; this information will only be made available to you if you follow the technology developments closely.
  • Scalability: It is important to see if the amount of space you have in the cloud is the only amount of space you are using; lest you pay more for than what you use. Additionally, if you need more space suddenly, it is important to see if the current arrangement is scalable. Insufficient space is as problematic as abundant space in the cloud. It, therefore, becomes vital to keep a balance and pick options that work best for you.
  • Reliability: Reliability is an important piece of the puzzle. Is the data in a safe place that is accessible as and when needed? Is the data backed up to ensure that nothing is lost in space? All of these are important things to look at while managing the cloud.

As businesses start to adapt cloud services, many are suffering because of cloud sprawling. What’s more, the different departments within the organization are using different systems to solve different issues within the cloud. Often organizations do not know how it works and where the gaps in the business are. Additionally, because of the lack of knowledge in cloud technology to begin with; more and more organizations are losing money; while they could potentially be saving it.

The Solution: Leveraging SaaS-based Platforms

SaaS-based platforms and applications best help organizations with this very thing. They make organizations cloud management easier while ensuring efficiency. With SaaS, organizations can leave the maintenance of the physical servers and cloud-based software application to the SaaS provider. Instead, organizations can use the cloud whilst the SaaS provider manages everything at a subscription fee. Software updates, management of developed software application, and so on are all managed through a web browser. Though you lose some amount of control on the customization of the product; management, updates, and maintenance will no longer be your organization’s headache.

Overall, there are many solution providers that help organizations manage their cloud platform. Here are some of the benefits that they get to the table.

Flexibility of options: There are many best-of-breed functionalities that are provided by SaaS platforms. SaaS solutions are available for almost every kind of cloud challenge or need. There are those that support web services and some that support HTTP REST. Others have SOAP services or have proprietary APIs to integrate with.  There are still others that only integrate using a file-based integration. For these diverse options, on the enterprise side, there are tools to integrate with SaaS applications as well. This gives organizations different options to choose from based on their organizational size, requirements and budgets.

Efficiency and support: SaaS provider’s expertise lies in their ability to make SaaS work for your organization; that is their product offering. This means they have spent time and resources to research on how to better your SaaS experience and continue to do so. Additionally, they are backed by experience and the wherewithal to deal with any issues that may rise and the expertise to deal with them. They typically are equipped to handle emergencies, or at least will have a team of researchers working on how to fix the problem and offer support.  

Lower operation cost: SaaS-based applications provide the option to take on their services for a fee. This means that you do not need resources within the organization that are looking at cloud based solutions or problem solving in these areas.  A subscription based model results in lesser amount of money spent on hardware, software, and people required to manage it. You, as an organization, know exactly how much you will be paying as compared to sourcing software individually.

Hassle free:  SaaS enables the integration of applications while ensuring access to all the needs of different roles within an organization. By maintaining, managing, and processing data that are kept on servers, SaaS solutions enable organizations to focus on what they do best – work towards building their product or solution. Some providers even provide a front-end server that is functional, even if the back-end cloud is down, making the working environment for the organization uninterrupted.

Scalability: The ability to scale as a SaaS provider is both efficient and seamless.  Additionally, some of the SaaS providers also provide customization options to their organization; giving them the flexibility to make the solution suit their specific needs. Additionally, since they have the ability to integrate with other SaaS solutions, it becomes easier to scale towards a new need or requirement.  

Seamless upgrades: The SaaS provider handles all the upgrades within the system and all of this is updated through the internet. So there are no patches that need to be deployed at the customer’s side to get everyone updated to the latest technology.  Security, upgrades, uptime, new features, and more – are all the responsibility of the SaaS provider, making working within the environment easier.

Reduced time to benefit: When you use a SaaS provider, their solutions come packed with all the features agreed up – installed and configured. The applications are ready to use, without down time to cater to each employee’s needs. Additionally, many SaaS providers also give free trials of application making decision making easier and with hands on experience.

Higher adoption rate: Most SaaS solutions are accessible through familiar web browsers. This makes it easier for people to access and learn, leading to higher adoption rate. The lack of a requirement for special tools or software to access enables users or employees to easily start working in their familiar environments. Additionally, it comes with the luxury of being able to work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection making it so much more convenient. Not to mention the access through multiple device options that is growing in popularity.

Transform how your company views IT: The company and the IT department of the organization gets completely transformed under the able watch of SaaS. With handling of the deployment and handling of applications and software, the IT department can focus more on the immediate needs of the organization. They can focus on goals that help, aid, and support the teams to achieve common organizational goals.

Having said this, it is clear that though cloud and SaaS are different, they can be closely related. The IoT is the future, and the integration of cloud with SaaS is paving the way to a smooth transition in the internet world. SaaS, with cloud, is enabling users integrate applications, find simpler more efficient fixes, automate processes and make DevOps a reality.

SaaS’s popularity is on a steady rise because of its simplified deployment capabilities and diminished set up and acquisition costs.  Latest features, improved services, and greater return on investments are just some of the salient features that are helping organizations using SaaS to benefit from this booming new business.

There are many SaaS-based companies that have started focusing on and expanding their SaaS offerings to help organizations overcome the difficulties that they face with technology. There are many options available, so it is important to pick the offering that best suits your organizational needs. There are many players big and small that provide great solutions at varied prices offering different kind of customization and support. Ensure to do the research before falling into a trap. Evaluate things like your needs, the costs involved, and the timeline of the project. Make sure that the SLA is in place and is agreed upon, both by you and your provider; this will help lay down clear expectations and protect yourself for contingencies that may occur.

This said, it is important to remember that this adaptation within an organization does take time; and change is a process and cannot be done overnight.

The Final Word

Change is not easy. Any change in an organization starts with a conversation and further a buy in by all the stakeholders; so as an organization always remember to get a buy in from the teams that will use this system.

What’s more, after you make the right decision on the kind of SaaS provider you want, you get the luxury of having a partner that is working towards helping make your business a success. This eventually leads to a mutually beneficial relationship.

Finally, Saas-based platforms aim at making it easy for enterprises to work with clouds and ensure they benefit from it. Botmetric, a product by Minjar, specializes in cloud implementation and consultation. It is an intelligent cloud management platform that is designed to make cloud easy for engineers. Sign up now, to see how Botmetic can help you with your SaaS needs.

The Biggest Roadblocks for Cloud Practitioners and Why You Should Know

Posted on by Editor

Cloud computing has been increasingly favoured over on-premise computing lately. A majority of IT industry players right from hardware manufacturers, OS, and middleware software developers to independent software vendors (ISVs) have embraced cloud.

A recently published IDG’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey (2016) indicates that by 2018 the typical IT department will have at least 60% of their apps and platforms hosted on the cloud.

Future of IT Platform is Cloud

Despite adoption, however, there are a lot of barriers to its adoption and acceleration. Another industry report indicates that 60% of engineering firms are slowing down their cloud adoption plans due to lack of security skills.

Skills gap is considered to be one of the major pet peeve of cloud practitioners across the globe. Apart from this challenge there are other barriers to the cloud adoption too. Just because there are challenges one must not stop there and hinder progress. The buck must not stop there. Why not turn these obstacles into opportunities and problems into possibilities?

As a cloud user, do you want to know the top pet peeves of a cloud practitioner and turn them into possibilities or opportunities? If yes, then you are at the right place. Read on these challenges collected from several cloud experts via an internal survey:

Apprehensions about Losing Control and Visibility over Data

Storing sensitive and proprietary data on external environment carries risks. Despite cloud providers providing successful case studies and guides for best practices, enterprise bureaucrats are still apprehensive about moving their data to the cloud. Because it becomes very difficult to see where the data resides exactly once it is on a public cloud.

The other perspective: If data is stored in the cloud, you can access it from anywhere, anytime, no matter what happens to your machine. Plus, you can have complete control over your data and even remotely erase data if you’re in doubt that it is in the wrong hands. Cloud providers also have fine grained Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls.

Moreover, there are many competitive SaaS platforms that bring data security tools integrated with other DevOps features so that cloud users don’t have to worry about losing control over their sensitive data sets.

Lesser Visibility and Control over Operations Compared to On-Prem IT Infra

A majority of businesses want to track the changes that are made during the IT operations. So, they are worried that there might not be complete visibility into their IT operations such as who is accessing what and when, like in on-prem IT infra.

The other perspective: It is a myth that cloud does not provide complete visibility and control. It provides complete visibility and control to the user, provided you have all authenticated access to it. Further, adopting DevOps platforms and tool chain such as Docker, Ansible etc. can empower enterprise teams to track and manage the entire Application development and deployment lifecycle.

Fear of Bill Shock

Cloud Services are priced entirely different from the simple fixed price models of standard servers in a data center. Budgeting and managing frequent cost changes in the cloud scenario is worrisome for most businesses, because the complex pricing model of the cloud get them overworked or overwhelmed.

The other perspective: Cloud goes with Opex, not Capex. With a well designed cloud architecture, along with a comprehensive cloud management plan, can always keep cloud cost under control and optimized. No bill shock, to be precise!

Good news is that there are several SaaS-based CloudOps solutions that integrate natively with the Core Cloud Platform leveraging the Open APIs. They can dynamically provision and decommission system resources based on dynamic parameters like workloads, user traffic, etc. By optimizing the resource utilization, these CloudOps platforms can bring down the operational costs drastically. Additionally, these platforms feature advanced dashboards that can help companies to establish budgetary controls and track the actual cost accruals against the planned costs. Such tools can help enterprises overcome the fear of costs overshooting.

Acquiring New Skillset for Cloud Management

Cloud platforms have radically altered the application development lifecycle automation and continue to do so with emerging cutting-edge technologies. To that end, businesses have to continually acquire DevOps teams adept with all the new emerging technologies, essentially to manage the cloud servers over the different lifecycle stages such as PoC, test, staging, and production.

The other perspective: Instead of hiring a team of engineers for Ops why not just automate known IT ops using tools and just focus on development? The skills shortage always seems like a problem across the industry. Moreover, cloudOps automation platforms like Botmetric can help the technology complexity underneath the Cloud by automating many of the frequent tasks that are expected to be performed.

The Bottom Line: Many CloudOps Platforms and Tools to the Rescue

Several third party software vendors have ventured to fill the gaps in the core cloud platforms and solve most of the concerns voiced by the cloud users. As a Cloud Expert one should be knowledgeable about these extension tools to bridge the gap between the Cloud platforms capabilities and Enterprise teams’ needs.

Share you feedback in the comment section below or give us a shout out on any of our social media channels. We are all ears.

April Roundup @ Botmetric: Aiding Teamwork to Solidify 3 Pillars of Cloud Management

Posted on by Editor

Spring is still on at Botmetric, and we continue to evolve like seasons with new features. This month, the focus was on how to bring in more collaboration and teamwork while performing various tasks related to cloud management. The three pillars of cloud management, visibility, control, and optimization, can be solidified only with seamless collaboration. To that end, Botmetric released two cool collaborative features in April: Slack Integration and Share Reports.

1. Slack Integration

What is it about: Integrating Slack collaboration tool and Botmetric so that a cloud engineer will never miss an alert or notification when on a Slack channel and quickly communicate/alert it to their team ASAP. 

How will it help: Cloud engineers can quickly get a sneak-peak into specific Botmetric alerts, as well as details of various cloud events, on their desired channel of Slack. Be it an alert generated by Botmetric’s Cost & Governance, Security & Compliance, or Ops & Automation, engineers can see these alerts without logged into Botmetric, and quickly communicate the problem between the team members.

Where can you find this feature on Botmetric: Under the Admin section inside 3rd Party Integrations.

To know more in detail, read the blog ‘Botmetric Brings Slack Fun to Cloud Engineers’

2. Share/Email Data-Rich AWS Cloud Reports Instantly

What is it about: Sharing/emailing Botmetric reports directly from Botmetric. No downloading required.

How will it help: For successful cloud management, all the team members need complete visibility with pertinent data in the form of AWS cloud reports. The new ‘Share Reports’ feature provides complete visibility across accounts and helps multiple AWS users in the team better collaborate while managing the cloud.

Where can you find this feature on Botmetric: Across all the Botmetric products in the form of a share icon.

To know more in detail, read the blog ‘Share Data-Rich AWS Cloud Reports Instantly with Your Team Directly From Botmetric.’

Knowledge Sharing @ Botmetric

Continuing our new tradition to provide quick bites and snippets on better AWS cloud management, here are few blogs that we covered in the month of April:

Gauge AWS S3 Spend, Minimize AWS S3 Bill Shock

AWS S3 offers a durability of  99.999999999% compared to other object storage on AWS, and features simple web interface to store and retrieve any amount of data. When it comes to AWS S3 spend, it has something more in it beyond just the storage cost. If you’re a operations manager or a cloud engineer, you probably know that data read/write or data moved in/out also do count  AWS S3 bill. Hence, a detailed analysis of all these can help you keep AWS S3 bill shock to a minimum. To know how, visit this page.

7 Tips on How to Work the Magic With DevOps for AWS Cloud Management

Are you a DevOps engineer looking for complete AWS cloud management? Or are you a AWS user looking to use DevOps practices to optimize your AWS usage? Both ways, AWS and DevOps are modern way of getting things done. You should leverage new age DevOps tools for monitoring, application performance management, log management, security, data protection and cloud management instead of trying to build adhoc automation or dealing with primitive tools offered by AWS.

Get the top seven tips on how to work the magic with DevOps for AWS cloud management.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet On Deployment Automation Using AWS S3, CodeDeploy & Jenkins

If you’re a DevOps engineer or an enterprise looking for a complete guide on how to automate app deployment using Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deliver(CD) strategies, and tools like AWS S3, CodeDeploy, Jenkins & Code Commit, then bookmark this blog penned by Minjar’s cloud expert.

Botmetric Cloud Explorer: A Handy Topological Relationship View of AWS Resources

Do you want to get a complete understanding of your AWS infrastructure. And map how each resources are connected and where they stand today for building stronger governance, auditing, and tracking of resources. Above all get one handy, cumulative relationship view of AWS resources without using AWS Config service. Read this blog how to get a complete topological relationship view of your AWS resources.

The Cloud Computing Think-Tank Pieces @ Botmetric

5 Reasons Why You Should Question Your Old AWS Cloud Security Practices

While you scale your business on cloud, AWS too keeps scaling its services too. So, cloud engineers have to constantly adapt to architectural changes as and when AWS updates are announced. While all architectural changes are made, AWS Cloud Security best practices and audits need to be relooked too from time to time.

Tightly Integrated AWS Cloud Security Platform Just a Click Away

As a CISO, you must question your old practices and relook at them whether it’s relevant in the present day. Here’re the excerpts from a think tank session highlighting the five reasons why you should question your old practices.

The Rise of Anything as a Service (XaaS): The New Hulk of Cloud Computing

The ‘Cloud-driven aaS’ era is clearly upon us. Besides the typical SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS offerings discussed, there are other ‘As-a-Service(aaS)’ offerings too. For instance, Database-as-a-service, Storage-as-a-Service, Windows-as-a-Service, and even Malware-as-a-Service. It is the era of Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS). Read the excerpts from an article by Amarkant Singh, Head of Product, Botmetric, featured on Stratoscale, which share views on XaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

April Wrap-Up: Helping Bring Success to Cloud Management

Rain or shine, Botmetric has always striven to bring success to cloud management. And will continue to do so with DevOps, NoOps, AIOps solutions.

If you have missed rating us, you can do it here now. If you haven’t tried Botmetric, we invite you to sign-up for a 14-day trial. Until the next month, stay tuned with us on Social Media.

Share Data-Rich AWS Cloud Reports Instantly with Your Team Directly From Botmetric

Posted on by Tarun G

Once Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” This adage holds so true to find success while managing AWS cloud. For the reason that: to achieve complete AWS cloud management is not a one person’s responsibility, but is a shared responsibility and more so a teamwork. And for the teamwork to reap benefits, all the team members need complete visibility with pertinent data in the form of AWS cloud reports in hand. To cater to this need Botmetric has introduced ‘Share Reports’ feature that allows a Botmetric user to share important AWS cost, security or Ops automation reports with multiple AWS users for better collaboration.

If you’re a Botmetric user, you can now:

  • Share the data-rich reports directly from any Botmetric products, thus saving time and effort
  • Educate both Botmetric and non-Botmetric user(s) within your team about various aspects of your AWS infrastructure
  • Highlight items that may need action by other teammates

Why Botmetric Built Share Reports

Currently, Botmetric offers more than 40 reports and 30 graphs and charts. These reports, charts and graphs help for better cloud governance. More so, these data-rich reports offer a great culmination of insights and help keep you updated on your AWS infrastructure.

Earlier, Botmetric empowered its users (those added to your Botmetric account) to download all these reports. However, at times, it’s likely you’ll need to send perpetual reports to other colleagues too that may not be part of your Botmetric Account.

Thus, continuing our mission to provide complete visibility and control for AWS users and your AWS infrastructure, Botmetric now allows you to email/share those reports directly to non-Botmetric user(s) too. By doing so, Botmetric empowers every custodian for cloud in your organization responsible for cloud with pertinent data, even if they are not Botmetric users.

More so, the new share functionality enables you to share specific reports across Cost & Governance, Security & Compliance, and Ops & Automation to custodians who are not Botmetric users in your organization and wish to discover knowledge on certain AWS cloud items.

The new share reports can be used across Botmetric platform in two specific ways:

1. Share Historical Reports

Share all the AWS cloud reports present under reports library on the Botmetric console to other custodians in the team.

Share all the AWS Cloud reports for better cloud management

2. Export and Share Charts and Graphs as CSV Reports

If you find any crucial information in any of the reports under Botmetric Cost & Governance, Security & Compliance or Ops & Automation, you can share using the ‘Share icon’ to any other custodian who isn’t Botmetric user(s) but responsible for cloud.

Share AWS cloud reports on Cost, Security, Ops with the team using Botmetric

For example, you would want to share the list of ports open to public to the person in your team who is responsible for perimeter security. You can do this from Audit Reports section of Security & Compliance.

The Bottom Line:

AWS has more than 70 resources and each resource has multiple family types. With so many variance in AWS’ services, you surely need either holistic information or a particular information at some point for analysis. With Botmetric reports and the new sharability feature, you and your team can together manage and optimize your AWS cloud with minimal effort.    

If you are a current Botmetric user, then Team Botmetric invites you to try this feature and share your feedback. If you’re yet to try Botmetric and want to explore this feature, then take up a 14 day trial . If you have any questions on AWS cloud management, just drop in a line below in the comment section or give us a shout out at @BotmetricHQ.

7 Tips on How to Work the Magic With DevOps for AWS Cloud Management

Posted on by Editor

If you look at it, both Cloud and DevOps have gained importance because they help address some key transitions in IT. Cloud and DevOps have played a big role in helping IT address some of the biggest transformative shifts of our times. One, the rise of the service economy; two, the unprecedented, almost continuous, pace of disruption and thirdly, the infusion of digital into every facet of our lives. These are the shifts that are driving business in the 21st century. And DevOps for AWS Cloud Management is a match made in heaven.

Are you a DevOps engineer looking for AWS cloud management, then you’re at the right place. Read on to know how AWS and DevOps practices are a go-to combo.

The Backdrop

Cloud has finally come of age in the last few years. Gartner has projected that the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18 percent in 2017 to a total $246.8 billion, up from $209.2 billion in 2016. Out of this, the highest growth is expected to come from cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is projected to grow 36.8 percent in 2017 to reach $34.6 billion.

IDC too has it’s views:

worldwide public cloud services market report from IDC Image Source: IDC 2017 Forecast on Public IT Spending

Several companies are hosting enterprise applications in AWS, suggesting that CIOs have become more comfortable hosting critical software in the public cloud. As per Forrester, the first wave of cloud computing was created by Amazon Web Services, which launched with a few simple compute and storage services in 2006. A decade later, AWS is operating at an $11 billion run rate.

“As a mindset, cloud is really about how you do your computing rather than where you do it.”

And with public cloud like AWS, it already provides a set of flexible services designed to enable companies to more rapidly and reliably build and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance.

“In simple words: AWS Cloud Management becomes much simpler through the use of DevOps and vice-versa.”

An essential element of DevOps is that development and operations are bound together, which means that configuration of the infrastructure is part of the code itself. This basically means that unlike the traditional process of doing development on one machine and deployment on another one, the machine becomes part of the application. This is almost impossible without cloud, because in order to get better reliability and performance, the infrastructure needs scale up and down as needed.

On its part, DevOps has gained its spotlight in the software development field, and is growing from strength to strength. DevOps has seen a tremendous increase in adoption in the recent years, becoming an essential component of software-centric organizations. But when DevOps and Cloud come together is when real magic is created.

Below are few useful tips to ensure that you get the most from your DevOps for AWS Cloud Management.

1. Templatize your Cloud Architecture

“Build your Cloud as Code.”

Using AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or creating your own templates, you can describe the AWS resources including the deployment configuration, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application.

AWS CloudFormation’s sample templateImage Source: AWS CloudFormation Docs

This allows developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

This not only allows the source control of VPC design, application deployment architecture, network security design and application configuration in JSON format. In case you require multi-cloud support for safely creating and managing the cloud infrastructure at scale, you can consider using Terraform. This can help everyone in your team to understand your cloud design.

One great thing about CloudFormation is that you don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtitles of making those dependencies work. Once the AWS resources are deployed, it is possible to modify and update them in a controlled and predictable way, similar to the manner in which you apply version control to your AWS infrastructure.

“The best part is that CloudFormation is available at no additional charge, and customers need to pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications.”

2. Automate with AWS Cloud Management Tools

Cloud makes it easier for you to automate everything using APIs. AWS provides a bunch of services that help organizations practice DevOps, and these are built first for use with AWS. These tools have the capability to automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high velocity that is enabled by DevOps.  

AWS cloud automation tools help you use automation so you can build faster and more efficiently.

AWS Automation Tools

You might want to first and foremost automate the build and deploy process of your applications.  You can leverage Jenkins or CodePipeline to CodeDeploy to automate your build-test-release-deploy process. This will enable anyone from your team to deploy a new piece of code into production, potentially saving hundreds of hours every month for your engineers.

Using AWS services, you can also automate manual tasks or processes including deployments, development & test workflows, container management, and configuration management.

Doing manual work in the Cloud through console can be quite problematic. You simply cannot deal with the complexity and configuration required for your applications without automating everything from provisioning, config, build, release, deployment, monitor and troubleshooting issues.

“In Cloud, the only thing you should trust is your automation. Automate IT.”

3. Free up Engineers’ Time Using Managed DB and Search

In most cases, there is absolutely no reason for you to run your own SQL databases. AWS offers some great services – RDS and ElasticSearch. These can free you from the worry of the AWS Cloud Management processes by managing the complexity and handling underlying infrastructure.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch for log analytics, full text search, application monitoring, and more. Similarly, the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.

These managed offerings from AWS make everything from patch management, horizontal scalability to read replicas a breeze. The best part is that these will free up your engineers’ time to focus on more business initiatives by offloading a large chunk of operational work to AWS.

4. Simplify Troubleshooting Through Centralized Log Management

“DevOps allows you to do frequent deploys, so you debug quickly and do the release. With Centralized Log Management, debugging gets quicker and faster.”

The most important debug information of your applications that you need for troubleshooting will be in the log files. Therefore, you need a centralized system to collect and manage it. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS CloudTrail, and other sources. The ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) or EKK stack (Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Kinesis, and Kibana) is a solution that eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of deploying, managing, and scaling your log aggregation solution. With the EKK stack, you can focus on analyzing logs and debugging your application, instead of managing and scaling the system that aggregates the logs.

You should look at using CloudWatch Logs to stream all logs from your servers into ELK stack provided by AWS. You can look at Sumologic or Loggly for doing this as well if you need advanced analytics and grouping of logs data. This will allow engineers to look at information for troubleshooting problems or handling issues without worrying about SSH access to systems.

5. Get Round-the-Clock Cloud Visibility

DevOps is a continuous process. Put it in action for round-the-clock cloud visibility. And Every business needs visibility into their cloud usage by users, operations, applications, access and network flow standpoint.

DevOps is a Continuous Process

You can do this easily in AWS using AWS’ DevOps tools like CloudTrail logs, VPC Flow logs, RDS Logs and ELB/CloudFront logs. You will have everything needed to audit what happened and when from where to understand any incident. This will help you understand and troubleshoot events faster.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain events related to API calls across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

Similarly, VPC Flow Logs is a feature that enables you to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. Flow log data is stored using Amazon CloudWatch Logs. After you’ve created a flow log, you can view and retrieve its data in Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Flow logs can help you with a number of tasks; for example, to troubleshoot why specific traffic is not reaching an instance, which in turn can help you diagnose overly restrictive security group rules.

You can also use flow logs as a security tool to monitor the traffic that is reaching your instance.

You can also monitor the MySQL error log, the slow query log, and the general log directly through the Amazon RDS console, the Amazon RDS API, the Amazon RDS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. 

6. Manage ROI Intelligently

“DevOps is the culture of innovating at velocity. Using DevOps concepts you can help keep cloud ROI in check.”

One of the benefits of moving your business to Cloud is reducing your infrastructure costs. Before you find ways to maximize your AWS Cloud ROI, you need to first have the right data to help you make decisions. After all, knowing how to control your cloud costs is easy when all the right data comes together in a single dashboard to help you make decisions. There are tools (including from  Botmetric) that provide full visibility into your cloud across the company to build a meaningful picture of expenses and analyze resources by business units or departments. With these tools, you have immediate answers to why your AWS cloud costs spiked or what caused it.

“A penny saved is a penny earned. Ensure you track down every unused and underused resource in your AWS cloud and help increase ROI.”

Using Botmetric products, you can fix cost leaks within minutes using the powerful click-to-fix automation. You also have a unified cloud cost savings dashboard to understand utilization across your business to know cost spillage at business unit or cloud account level.

Cloud capacity planning is pivotal to reduce your overall cloud spend. There is no better way to maximize ROI than considering Reserved Instance purchases in AWS for your predictable usage for the year.

With RI, you pay the low hourly usage fee for every hour in your Reserved Instance term. This means you’re charged hourly regardless of whether any usage has occurred during an hour. When your total quantity of running instances during a given hour exceeds the number of applicable RIs you own, you will be charged the On-Demand rate. There are other dynamics to it too.

Botmetric’s AWS Reserved Instance planner (RI Planner) evaluates cloud utilization to recommend intelligent ways for optimizing AWS RI costs. It enables you to plan right. Even better, there will be no more over reservation or underutilization. You have access to a suite of intelligent RI recommendation algorithms and smart RI purchase planner to save weeks of effort.

With the recent models, you can simplify the RI management and not worry about tiny configuration details for taking advantage of it in a region. You should have mechanisms to alert you in case of unused RI. With an effective RI, you can keep everyone happy and save money for the company.

7. Ensuring Top-Notch AWS Cloud Security

You can provide a far better security in AWS than you can potentially do in a data center without worrying about an exorbitant licensing cost for legacy security tools.

AWS provides WAF, DDoS Protection, Inspector, System Manager, Trusted Advisor and Config Rules for protecting your Cloud while you can get virtually all other security tools from the marketplace.

AWS CloudTrail, which provides a history of AWS API calls for an account, too facilitates security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing of an AWS environment.

Moreover, CloudTrail is an essential service for understanding AWS usage and should be enabled in every region – for all AWS accounts regardless of where services are deployed.

As a DevOps engineer, you can also use AWS Config, which creates an AWS resource inventory like configuration history, configuration change notification, and relationships between AWS resources. It provides a timeline of resource configuration changes for specific services too.  Plus, change snapshots are stored in a specified Amazon S3 bucket and can be configured to send Amazon SNS notifications when AWS resource changes are detected. This will help keep vulnerabilities under check.

Not to forget: add an additional layer of security for your business with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for your AWS Root Account and all IAM users. The same should be applied for your SSH Jumpbox as well so no one can access it directly. You should enable MFA for all your critical S3 buckets that have business information & backup data to ensure it’s protected from accidental terminations. Given the number of advantages that MFA protection has for enhanced security, there is no reason for you to avoid it. This provides additional protection to secure your cloud and data.

Concluding Thoughts: Adopt Modern DevOps Tools

If cloud is a new way of computing then DevOps is the modern way of getting things done. You should leverage new age DevOps tools for monitoring, application performance management, log management, security, data protection and cloud management instead of trying to build adhoc automation or dealing with primitive tools offered by AWS. A good tool like New Relic, Shippable, CloudPassage etc. can save time and effort. However, using intelligent DevOps platform like Botmetric is the way forward if you want simplified cloud operations.

We’re at a stage now where most organisations don’t really need to be educated about the value of cloud computing, so to speak. The major advantages of cloud including agility, scalability, cost benefits, innovation and business growth are fairly well established. Rather, it is a matter of businesses trying to evaluate how they can fit cloud into their overall IT strategies.

With new innovations and changing dynamics, and increased demand of DevOps users, businesses are becoming more agile with each passing day. But DevOps isn’t the easiest thing in the world. We hope that your endeavor to get the best of your DevOps and AWS Cloud combo becomes a breeze with these seven tips! Do drop in a line or two below about what you think. Until next time, stay tuned! 

Make AWS Cloud Management a Breeze with New Botmetric Cloud Reporting Module

Posted on by Vijay Rayapati

In an effort to help you quickly find your AWS cloud reports from one centralized module without scrolling, and to counter endless searching for what you need, we came up with a completely revamped AWS cloud reporting module in the ‘All-New’ Botmetric.

Over the years, we’ve become more and more aware of the fact that the key to optimizing the cloud infrastructure is to avoid common mistakes and implement the best practices using a right-sized cloud management console  that aggregates all the key data in one place. With the new Cloud Reporting feature, you can get an aggregated view of your AWS cloud health in a single pane, thus making AWS cloud management a breeze.   

Key benefits of Botmetric’s new AWS cloud reporting module include:

  • A centralized reporting module

We brought together all reports in one centralized module for Botmetric’s new suite of applications so that you can find everything you need in one place. You can now quickly filter the reports by application type (Cost & Governance, Security & Compliance or Ops & Automation) providing more clarity into your AWS’ spend, security, governance, and more. In essence, the new Cloud Reporting module will save time and reduce the manual search-overhead for you.

Centralized reporting module in 'all-new' Botmetric

  • Daily, weekly, and monthly split of reports

Under the new reporting module, you can quickly locate all daily, weekly, and monthly reports for Cost & Governance, Security & Compliance or Ops & Automation using the simple left side navigation filtering. You no longer need to scroll through all reports to find what you need.

View Split of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Reports in Botmetric AWS Cloud Management

 

  • Filter reports by AWS accounts or month for deep drill down of data:

The new Cloud Reporting module now includes a quick filtering support too so that you can find the reports for specific AWS accounts or a month. This will help you navigate to historic reports and switch between different AWS accounts from a single pane.

Filter Reports by AWS Accounts or Month with Botmetric AWS Cloud Management Platform

What can you expect in the near future in Botmetric Cloud Reporting module for AWS cloud?

  • Create your own reports: Many of our customers asked us to give them the ability to create custom reports. We are working on this request. To this end, we’ll be rolling-out a custom reporting designer in Q1 of 2017.
  • Share reports via email: We will be soon launching report sharing support so that you can send specific reports to different stakeholders in your company, in a snap.

You can access the new Cloud Reporting module in the top right-hand corner of the Botmetric Cloud Management Platform, next to Notifications bar. We would love to hear how useful this module has been for you and how we can make it better to suit your needs.

We’ve also rolled-out the new compliance audit policies and improved security assessment in Botmetric to further simplify and help you resolve the most critical audit vulnerabilities. Give a quick shout out to us about the ‘All-New’ Botmetric. If you have not tried it, then sign-up for 14-day test drive  to experience how easy AWS cloud management is with Botmetric.  

Do read the  expert blog post  by Botmetric Customer Success Manager, Richa Nath, to unearth several other new features available in the new release. Stay tuned with us on  Twitter,  Facebook, and   LinkedIn  for other interesting news from us!

Introducing Botmetric 2.0 – A Unified & Intelligent Cloud Management Platform

Posted on by Editor

Editor’s Note: This exclusive launch blog post is penned by Vijay Rayapati, CEO at Botmetric.

Today is a big day, and I have some great news from Botmetric HQ. The all-new ‘Botmetric Platform’ is  out now!

Since Sep 2016, Botmetric 2.0 was in private beta for some of our users, and today we are launching the public availability of our new platform. Based on the feedback and our learning, we decided to turn Botmetric into a platform of applications that are use case targeted, instead of providing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ offering. To this end, Botmetric platform now has three products for unified cloud management:

    • Cost Management and Governance:  Built for CIO & Business heads
    • Cloud Security and Compliance:  Built for CISO & IT Security Engineers
    • Ops & Automation:  Built for CTO & DevOps Engineers

When we decided to work on the new Botmetric platform, the primary goal was to provide a great user experience, simplified and consistent design, with intelligent decisions & in-context customer engagement.

Our objective of taking the platform approach with applications was to reduce the information overload and help users find insights that matter to them in one-click. Above all, users get the information they want when they need without worrying about the rest of the modules.

When we already had a good product, why did we build the new Botmetric platform?

Because, we are on a mission to “simplify your cloud management by leveraging intelligence and automation”

To put this journey in perspective, we have been working with many public cloud users over the past 24 months to  understand their operational challenges in managing cloud; and how Botmetric could help simplify their daily lives. The feedback has been both overwhelming and heartening, like:

  • Botmetric is a good product and adds significant value for cloud management
  • Customers love the  super responsive customer support and design consistency offered by Botmetric
  • There are significant operational challenges that still remain unsolved for them, and Botmetric act as a control point to resolve these issues, etc.

Despite these feedback, as passionate cloud users, we did not stop here. We went ahead, spoke to many of our customers, and unearthed several facts. This sets the stage to answer a key question: Are we addressing the specific and evolving operational needs of our customers? Some of the key lessons we discerned are:

  1. Providing depth in specific areas such as Cost Management and Governance, Automation, Alerts Intelligence, Security and Compliance, instead of generic tools.
  2. Getting to a problem’s resolution, with one click that are further aided by  relevant insights.
  3. Providing great user experience and design across the platform.
  4. Offering deeper user engagement with bolstered, intelligent features and automated decisions.

This is why ‘the new Botmetric platform’ was born.

Five new things that will make you fall in love with the new Botmetric:

  1. Consistent UX across the platform and the apps: Our foremost goal while designing the new platform was to provide a great user experience and significantly improve the utility value for our customers. We have spent  a lot of time talking to many customers & trial users to capture their feedback. The new platform provides a thought through design consistency across interactions of various applications.
  2. Freedom to choose what is necessary with modularized applications: We have unbundled previous Botmetric offerings into three specific applications categorized as Cost & Governance,   Security & Compliance,   Ops & Automation.  This allows users to use what they need without worrying about other things. However, as a company, users can use everything offered by Botmetric to solve their overall operational problems from cost, security, and automation standpoint.
  3. Improved reporting and admin modules: We have completely revamped the reporting modules by Cost & Governance,  Security & Compliance,  Ops & Automation so users can easily discover the relevant reports as they need. The admin module is simplified for easier configuration management.
  4. Brand new features with intelligence: We are rolling out many new features that have been in the work for quite sometime as requested by our users. The Cost & Governance module provides data transfer analysis, chargeback & budgeting capabilities. We have rolled out various compliance policies in the Security & Compliance application to help users understand what they need to fix first.
  5. Highly responsive and modular design – The new platform uses responsive design and AngularJS framework for front end engineering. This makes it easier for our users to use it wherever they want. Our users can try the application across different screen resolutions and devices.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the old version be available?

The older version will be be available for existing users until 15th of Dec 2016.

Is there a price increase in my subscription?

No, all the existing users will pay as per their previous subscription plans.

Why should I move to new Botmetric?

The new platform is easier to use. It has consistent design, and also simplifies users’ lives with new features.

Will there be any training or webinars on the new Botmetric platform?

Yes. A webinar will be announced very soon that will give a walk through of the product. For further details about this webinar, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We are truly excited  about this launch and gratified that  our customers have played a part in this co-creation by participating  in  our private beta, shared feedback and appreciation. We truly appreciate that and also be assured, we are  going to be very focused on improving our new platform further over next few months. We would love to hear your feedback on the new platform and please write to us at  support@botmetric.com.  Do  explore the new  Botmetric today.

Introducing Botmetric 2.0 – A Unified & Intelligent Cloud Management Platform

Posted on by Rajeev Kumar

Editor’s Note: This exclusive launch blog post is penned by Vijay Rayapati, CEO at Botmetric.

Today is a big day, and I have some great news from Botmetric HQ. The all-new ‘Botmetric Platform’ is  out now!

Since Sep 2016, Botmetric 2.0 was in private beta for some of our users, and today we are launching the public availability of our new platform. Based on the feedback and our learning, we decided to turn Botmetric into a platform of applications that are use case targeted, instead of providing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ offering. To this end, Botmetric platform now has three products for unified cloud management:

    • Cost Management and Governance:  Built for CIO & Business heads
    • Cloud Security and Compliance:  Built for CISO & IT Security Engineers
    • Ops & Automation:  Built for CTO & DevOps Engineers

When we decided to work on the new Botmetric platform, the primary goal was to provide a great user experience, simplified and consistent design, with intelligent decisions & in-context customer engagement.

Our objective of taking the platform approach with applications was to reduce the information overload and help users find insights that matter to them in one-click. Above all, users get the information they want when they need without worrying about the rest of the modules.

When we already had a good product, why did we build the new Botmetric platform?

Because, we are on a mission to “simplify your cloud management by leveraging intelligence and automation”

To put this journey in perspective, we have been working with many public cloud users over the past 24 months to  understand their operational challenges in managing cloud; and how Botmetric could help simplify their daily lives. The feedback has been both overwhelming and heartening, like:

  • Botmetric is a good product and adds significant value for cloud management
  • Customers love the  super responsive customer support and design consistency offered by Botmetric
  • There are significant operational challenges that still remain unsolved for them, and Botmetric act as a control point to resolve these issues, etc.

Despite these feedback, as passionate cloud users, we did not stop here. We went ahead, spoke to many of our customers, and unearthed several facts. This sets the stage to answer a key question: Are we addressing the specific and evolving operational needs of our customers? Some of the key lessons we discerned are:

  1. Providing depth in specific areas such as Cost Management and Governance, Automation, Alerts Intelligence, Security and Compliance, instead of generic tools.
  2. Getting to a problem’s resolution, with one click that are further aided by  relevant insights.
  3. Providing great user experience and design across the platform.
  4. Offering deeper user engagement with bolstered, intelligent features and automated decisions.

This is why ‘the new Botmetric platform’ was born.

Five new things that will make you fall in love with the new Botmetric:

  1. Consistent UX across the platform and the apps: Our foremost goal while designing the new platform was to provide a great user experience and significantly improve the utility value for our customers. We have spent  a lot of time talking to many customers & trial users to capture their feedback. The new platform provides a thought through design consistency across interactions of various applications.
  2. Freedom to choose what is necessary with modularized applications: We have unbundled previous Botmetric offerings into three specific applications categorized as Cost & Governance,   Security & Compliance,   Ops & Automation.  This allows users to use what they need without worrying about other things. However, as a company, users can use everything offered by Botmetric to solve their overall operational problems from cost, security, and automation standpoint.
  3. Improved reporting and admin modules: We have completely revamped the reporting modules by Cost & Governance,  Security & Compliance,  Ops & Automation so users can easily discover the relevant reports as they need. The admin module is simplified for easier configuration management.
  4. Brand new features with intelligence: We are rolling out many new features that have been in the work for quite sometime as requested by our users. The Cost & Governance module provides data transfer analysis, chargeback & budgeting capabilities. We have rolled out various compliance policies in the Security & Compliance application to help users understand what they need to fix first.
  5. Highly responsive and modular design – The new platform uses responsive design and AngularJS framework for front end engineering. This makes it easier for our users to use it wherever they want. Our users can try the application across different screen resolutions and devices.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the old version be available?

The older version will be be available for existing users until 15th of Dec 2016.

Is there a price increase in my subscription?

No, all the existing users will pay as per their previous subscription plans.

Why should I move to new Botmetric?

The new platform is easier to use. It has consistent design, and also simplifies users’ lives with new features.

Will there be any training or webinars on the new Botmetric platform?

Yes. A webinar will be announced very soon that will give a walk through of the product. For further details about this webinar, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We are truly excited  about this launch and gratified that  our customers have played a part in this co-creation by participating  in  our private beta, shared feedback and appreciation. We truly appreciate that and also be assured, we are  going to be very focused on improving our new platform further over next few months. We would love to hear your feedback on the new platform and please write to us at  support@botmetric.com.  Do  explore the new  Botmetric today.

4 Ways to Tackle the AWS Cloud Management Complexity With a Right-Sized Admin Console

Posted on by Shubham Mittal

With AWS cloud computing catching up quickly across industries and verticals, more and more applications are being moved to the cloud. Most cloud infrastructure providers are innovating at a furious rate to provide new features. While the features are constantly being added, the Cloud management Admin Console which is the central portal for technology managers to configure their infrastructure is growing in complexity at a rapid pace.  Below are the four crucial aspects in designing the admin console that will help tame the AWS cloud management complexity using a right-sized cloud management console.

1.AWS, Hyper Growth and Cloud Complexity

The complexity of the Cloud Platform and tools makes it difficult for the early stage companies to migrate to the Cloud. Even companies with already some applications hosted on the Cloud find it difficult to be sure of whether their infrastructure is configured to take the best advantage of the recent innovations in terms of performance, security and cost perspectives. While Cloud management technology specialists and tools have emerged to assist the organizations, the need for innovation and optimization in the Administration Console is key for organizations to have better visibility and control over their Cloud deployment strategy.

2. DevOps – the right User Group for the Cloud Dashboard

The Right Admin Console for the Cloud Management Platform should start from the assumption that the key user group of the tool should not be “Cloud Specialists”. If this is not the case, the team that is managing the application deployed on the cloud should be forced to have cloud specialists amongst them, defeating the key purpose of having a cloud management platform itself

If cloud specialists is not the user group, then who should be the key user group? DevOps.  DevOps are the cloud managers. While they constantly monitor the AWS service health, they also take decisions on adding and removing resources to fine tune the application performance. If the dashboard which allows the DevOps to manage the performance of the Cloud Infrastructure help them consider cost implications of the performance tuning without having to be Cloud technology specialists, it would
be an ideal tool. Such tools that support DevOps would actually transform cost management into an engineering task.

Today, every IT team whether in startups or large enterprises would have a DevOps among their ranks. If the Cloud Management dashboard can help the DevOps manage the Cloud Configuration management also, it would help organizations tame cloud complexity without having to incur the cost of an additional human resource.

3. Network Visualizations

Visualizations are powerful tools that help managers understanding the underlying data. Cloud management platforms should help administrators visualize their underlying network elements and how they are configured and related to each other. Here’s why: The network visualization provides a visual overview of all the features of the cloud infrastructure such as load-balancers, storage buckets, databases that have been leveraged to configure the current network.

4. Action Oriented Dashboard

While the cloud management platform would have to leverage advanced operational analytics and use data from diverse information sources like operating systems, cloud configuration managers, log managers, application managers etc., the dashboard should mask the complexity of the under the hood and present a functional view of Cloud in business terms such as Cost Management, Security, Backup and Disaster Management etc.

Even if the insights are presented in terms of KPIs, a cloud technology specialist might still be needed to interpret the KPIs and translate them into actions. Only if the right cloud admin dashboard can translate the insights into suggestions for actions, DevOps would be able to implement them quickly without having to dig deeper into the implications of each insight.

The Bottom Line

The key to optimizing the cloud Infrastructure is to avoid common mistakes and implement the best practices. A right-sized cloud management console aggregates all the common mistakes which are reported and automatically scans whether the particular configuration has any of these wrong configuration settings and immediately alerts the administrator to implement the remedial action.

What’s your take on this? Share your views and concerns with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Also,  sign-up for 14 day trial with Botmetric — the right-sized cloud management platform for today’s cloud patrons.

AWS Summit Santa Clara – Leading Innovation with Digital Transformation

Posted on by Rajeev Kumar

AWS, ever since its inception 10 years ago, has been making waves in the digital market. The AWS Summit Santa Clara, CA, this year showcased success stories and customer journey as the enterprises advanced on AWS and transformed digitally.

With more than 50 technical breakout sessions, customer success stories, partner presentations and awesome booth activities, AWS Summit Santa Clara was in full swing. And the energy of the crowd looked at an all-time high during the two-day event.

The event had over 8000 registrations, 54 technical sessions, and 60 expo partners showcasing their expertise.

Here are a few highlights of the event:

Keynote Session by Dr. Matt Wood

Matt kicked off the AWS Summit Santa Clara by walking the tech crowd through Amazon Cloud’s wonderful 10-year journey, and extended Amazon Cloud’s commitment to making data more accessible.

In past 10 years, AWS has been adding over 1000,000 active customers per month at the rate of $10B+ (perhaps the fastest run rate that any cloud provider has in the history so far). It also has been growing at 64% YoY (Q1 2015 to Q1 2016). The agility and benefits that AWS provides in shifting from capital to operational model, from on-premise to cloud have proved valuable to startups across the globe.

Here’s a look at the businesses that have grown and continue to explode on AWS:

AWS Startup

Botmetric Launched World’s First Expert Assisted Cloud Management Solution at AWS Summit Santa Clara

 

Botmetric unveiled the world’s first ‘Expert Assisted Cloud Management Solution’ during the AWS Summit in Santa Clara on 12th July, 2016. This solution enhances the utility of our platform for advanced AWS cloud customers. Above all, this solution is designed for the CIOs and CXOs seeking greater value from their existing cloud investments on AWS. Moreover, it will provide extended expert assistance to CIOs and CXOs to leverage the power of AWS productively, and also provide guaranteed outcome based cloud expert assistance for a customer, using Botmetric cloud management platform.

 

Read the full article, here.

 

New Announcements from AWS Summit Santa Clara

 

At the AWS Summit Santa Clara, AWS explained the crowd about the growing demand for containers and the rise of the era of containerization. On that note, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now allows you to specify an IAM role that can be used by the containers in an ECS task. Read the full story, here.

 

Another big announcement was that AWS DMS now supports continuous data replication and adds support for SAP ASE. Now, customers have an option of enabling multi-AZ. This will provide a replication stream that is fault tolerant through redundant replication servers. AWS DMS has the ability to migrate data between database engines and when it combines with continues replication, it results in an exponential growth of potential use cases. Read the full article here.

 

Botmetric Team at Booth 717

To embrace digital transformation and cloud hybridization, Botmetric has been constantly working with its customers to empower startups and help them scale up faster and profitably on AWS. We understand that to drive technology and innovation, businesses need to have strategic cost & governance, automation, security & compliance in place. We are closely working with a lot of startups in the U.S. and across the globe and are helping them effectively make the most of their cloud investments.

Our Minjas, Raj, Jai, and Ankur, had a great time interacting with cloud enthusiasts and booth visitors at the AWS Summit Santa Clara. The team had a fantastic experience giving live demos, and walking the crowd through our newly launched expert solution, Smart.Assist.

Few glimpses:

Botmetric Team-members

If you wish to learn more about Smart.Assist, feel free to drop us a line at Smart.Assist@botmetric.com.

To summarize, AWS Summit Santa Clara was a great show that demonstrated AWS Cloud’s ability to help the startup world grow, innovate, and transform digitally. As the digital world is soon shifting towards Internet of Things, AWS promises to provide the best data access to enterprises on cloud, globally.