My AWS Musings

Let’s say you have 10 ec2 instances up and they do various different kinds of work. Some are web servers, some are queue servers, some are cache servers and a cluster with hadoop/hbase. Have you found it hard to remember which server is which? Wouldn’t it be cool if Amazon let us name our servers?

We have found a solution. Ylastic provides an amazing and inexpensive web based interface for various AWS services. It allows you to name your ec2 instances and remembers it. If you have an autoscaling setup it will automatically name your autoscaled instances when they start e.g. webserver001, webserver002 etc.

Ylastic does much more than just naming the servers. It has a very user friendly user interface and also provides an iphone website from which you can start, stop instances etc. It also has a concept of locking an instance so that you don’t accidentally terminate it.

ylastic ec2 instances table

It has nice graphs for cloudwatch data.

ylastic cloudwatch graphs

It supports most of the AWS services such as EC2, RDS, Auto scaling, S3, Simple DB.

ylastic dashboard

It also lets you schedule tasks such as taking a snapshot of your ebs volumes etc. It keep tabs on your instances by receiving alerts when the state of the launched instance changes.

Ylastic costs only $25 per month per Amazon account. It allows you to create multiple users for the same Amazon account. Furthermore ylastic guys are amazingly fast. Their customer service usually comes back with an answer within the first hour. We have hardly had any complaints though. Most of the times we have suggested new features and these people have implemented them in few days.

I totally recommend ylastic. We are very happy with it at Bedrock. It has made our life easier.