14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., announced recently that it had released Amazon CloudWatch publicly, with new beta functions for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This service is meant to monitor AWS cloud resources, and it features Auto Scaling to ensure growing and shrinking of the Amazon EC2 capacity according to demand, as well as Elastic Load Balancing that will distribute incoming traffic across all Amazon EC2 instances.
These new features come with the purpose to provide developers and organizations with increased visibility into the good usage of their AWS compute resources, optimize application performance and decrease costs. All registered clients of Amazon EC2 are already able to use these innovations as part of the service. More details on the benefits of the new functions can be found here.
“Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers,” stated the general manager of Amazon EC2, Peter DeSantis. “Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings.”
More specifically, Amazon CloudWatch's monitoring for AWS cloud resources begins with Amazon EC2 and offers visibility to operational performance, resource utilization, and overall demand patterns, which include details on CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Customers who would like to use this new service will only need to choose the Amazon EC2 instances that interest them, and Amazon CloudWatch will soon start to aggregate and store information available for access through Command Line Tools or web service APIs.
The Auto Scaling feature enables clients to scale Amazon EC2 capacity depending on their predefined parameters. Moreover, it also ensures that the used Amazon EC2 instances scale up seamlessly, when needed, so as to maintain performance, or scale down when required to lower cost. Applications that register hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage should benefit most from Auto Scaling. This feature can be used along with Amazon CloudWatch with no additional fees.
Another functionality of the service is Elastic Load Balancing, which is meant to distribute incoming traffic on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It provides leveraged fault tolerance in applications, is able to detect unhealthy instances and will reroute traffic to healthy ones. Elastic Load Balancing can be enabled either on a single Availability Zone or on multiple ones to enhance application performance even more.
AWS customers already adopted the new features and seem content with them: “Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing improve the reliability of our applications, reduce support complexity, and improve our time to deployment of new solutions for our customers,” said Simon Plant, Product Lead for Cloud Computing at Capgemini. “We’re also excited by the reduced operational costs of having these features for Amazon EC2 built in because it will lower the total cost for software delivered from our organization.”
Both Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing can be used on a pay-as-you-go basis and they do not require an up-front fee or a long term commitment, and they are included in AWS Premium Support. Customers in the US can already benefit from the new features, whereas the European ones will be able to access them in the next few months.