There is no shortage of tools to measure and monitor Amazon Web Services usage and spending. Check out Cloudyn, Cloudability, Newvem et al. And then there is also Amazon's own Trusted Advisor. But if you want to use a tool that the biggest of the big AWS customers use, you may want to check out Netflix Ice.
Netflix just posted the tool onto its Github page, the last of a series of open-sourced Netflix goodies to go up.
Like the other AWS checkers, Netflix Ice relies on data supplied by Amazon's own APIs. With those stats in hand hand, it tracks usage by accounts, regions, AWS services like EC2, S3 storage and EBS, usage types by instance size, and whether you're using on-demand, reserved or other instance types, the pricing of which varies. Given the sheer number of servcies and options AWS offers, it's clear that tracking all of that is a handful, especially for a large organization.
Netflix has years of institutional knowledge on this topic, relying as it does on Amazon infrastructure. As the blog post states:
Netflix is a highly decentralized environment where each service team decides how many resources their services need. The elastic nature of the cloud make capacity planning less crucial and teams can simply add resources as needed. Viewing the broad picture of cloud resource usage becomes more difficult in such an environment. To address both needs, Netflix created Ice.
So, if you're a big AWS shop and would really like to get a handle on just what all your developers have running (or deployed and not running) on AWS cloud, you might want to check Ice out.
Los Altos, Calif.-based Netflix is really trying to propagate a range of the tools and utilities it uses to make sure its streaming media empire runs well on AWS. Most recently, it posted Isthmus, which vows to manage elastic load balancing across AWS regions. Isthmus, in turn, builds on Zuul, another tool that acts as a gatekeeper between between Netflix' own API and other Netflix services and AWS Elastic Load Balancer that routes video to users. The goal is to prevent meltdowns like the one that hit Netflix last Christmas Eve.
Netflix, as its cloud guru Adrian Cockroft said at an open source open house it hosted a few months ago, really wants outside companies to deploy its components and, it's very interested in getting other, non AWS cloud vendors, to deploy these tools as well. One can only imagine why.
WordPress.com
