Amazon Betas CloudWatch for More Control

May 18, 2009

Amazon Web Services released the public beta of new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Amazon CloudWatch, a web service for monitoring AWS cloud resources, Auto Scaling for automatically growing and shrinking Amazon EC2 capacity based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing for distributing incoming traffic across Amazon EC2 compute instances. Together, these capabilities provide businesses and developers with visibility into the health and usage of their AWS compute resources, enhance application performance, and lower costs. Registered customers of Amazon EC2 can immediately begin using these new features as part of the service.

“Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers,” said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings.”

Monitoring

Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides customers with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools.

Auto Scaling

Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Customers can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance.

Like all Amazon Web Services and features, Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis with no up-front fee, minimum spend or long term commitment. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees.

These features have already been adopted by a variety of AWS customers:

“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.”

“By using Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling features, we are able to dynamically launch and terminate instances in proportion to ShareThis traffic patterns. This removes the operational burden of ensuring our environments are never overloaded or underutilized, and guarantees we only pay for the resources we need,” said Mike Babineau, Head of IT Operations at ShareThis.

The features in AWS Premium Support and are currently available in the U.S. region with EU region availability in the next several months.