Amazon today announced a set of features to shore up their cloud offering. These new features on Amazon Cloudwatch, a webservice for monitoring AWS cloud resources, will help improve the overall experience with Amazon cloud.
What is Amazon Cloudwatch?
Amazon Cloudwatch is a webservice that will monitor AWS cloud resources like EC2 instances, EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers and Amazon RDS instances in real time. It provides customers with visibility into how their cloud resources are utilized, monitor the operational performance and overall demand patterns like CPU utilization, Disk Read/Write, Network Traffic, etc. and this data can be accessed using AWS Management Console, Webservice APIs or Command Line Tools.
What are the new features?
The new features announced today includes:
- Free Basic Monitoring – Amazon Cloudwatch can monitor the CPU Load, Disk I/O and Network I/O metrics of your EC2 instances for free
- Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks – The autoscaling feature can now take advantage of instance health information collected by the Elastic Load Balancer. Once the load balancer determines that an instance is unhealthy based on the established health checks, Auto Scaling will be instructed to terminate the unhealthy instances and launch new ones
- Alarms – This feature allows users to watch CloudWatch metrics and to receive notifications when the metrics fall outside of the levels (high or low thresholds) that they configured. One can attach multiple Alarms to each metric and each one can have multiple actions
- Auto-Scaling Suspend/Resume – This feature gives a fine-grained control over AutoScaling by stopping them before the triggers are activated. Suspended resource can also be activated independently
- Auto-Scaling follows the line – Users can now use scheduled actions to tell Auto Scaling to perform a scaling action at a certain point in time. This means that they can now create sophisticated scaling designs which take in to account actual system load as well as anticipated future activities. One can create 125 actions scheduled up to 31 days in into the future. This gives an ability to automatically scale up up to four times a day
- Auto-Scaling Policies – You now have more fine-grained control over the modifications to the size of your AutoScaling groups
Along with these new features, they have also announced AutoScaling support for VPC and HPC systems. This is clearly an interesting set of features some of which have a strong demand among the developers.
Related articles
- Amazon CloudWatch – Basic Monitoring for EC2 at No Charge (aws.typepad.com)
- New Features for Amazon CloudWatch (aws.typepad.com)
- Amazon CloudWatch Alarms (aws.typepad.com)
- Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks (aws.typepad.com)
- Auto Scaling Suspend/Resume (aws.typepad.com)
