A problem (and a solution) with AWS: no segregation of instances and no budgets

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is great and we use it as our #1 hosting infrastructure at Firmhouse. We still have some “old” traditional virtual servers laying around on some (also great) servers but we are slowly moving away from them to be totally scalable in a cloud environment.

There are however, one few problems with AWS if you’re hosting multiple websites or web applications on multiple instances for a variation of different clients and internal projects: you can’t keep track of costs and usage statistics in a categorized or budgetized manner.

Because we want to bill our clients what they are using from us (we do their managed hosting) and not give them some lame server package that is overpriced because of the overhead (100G they won’t be using) anyways, we want to give them an honest picture of what they are using and what virtual instances we have installed for them.

Amazon just gives you a credit card bill at the end of the month, which makes it  very hard to split all costs and usage into projects or budgets.

Also, Amazon bills you on one credit card but if you have multiple people working on one project with several AWS accounts, there is currently no way of getting some insights in what instances the members of a tream are launching and how much they cost all combined. All you get is $-signs on the credit card bills and the i-instance id’s in your management console(s).

And, budgets would really come in handy when you have a web application or piece of software that automatically scales itself on EC2 and launches instances by itself. Budgets shouldn’t mean terminating or stopping instances if the costs rise above a certain treshold but it would certainly come in handy if you would get a warning e-mail telling you the costs for this weeks where really of the charts so you could act accordingly and maybe re-thing your pricing strategy or make another business-wise decision.

BTW,  I should use another word for “budget”. I hate that word because usually involves guessing and the only thing you can guess is that your app shoud be scalable. But my usage of “budget” it should clarify my point. If you have another word, let me know

So, having that said:  *drumroll*

We’re Introducting Qloudwatch

We at Firmhouse have the need for solutions to these problems and we see these problems pop up in forums and mailing lists about AWS on other places we decided to get sweating and create a web app for this: Qloudwatch. We have a basic version up and running, so if you would like to try it please contact me at michiel@firmhouse.nl. The basic app currently has the following functionality:

• Create projects in which you can add instances recognized by the API in your AWS account.
• See the total cost of the project until “now” or view a history of the costs by month.
• Add billable and non-billable instances so you can for example bill all production instances to your clients and not bill your test instances.
• Invite other Qloudwatch users to a project so they can also add instances that can be set billable or non-billable so you can “share” statistics and costs on your instances.
• Get an automatic e-mail notification if you have running instances in your AWS account that you haven’t added to a project yet so you will never forget to categorize that one test hour you ran at 4 AM in the morning when your caffeine withdrawal started to kick in.

We would LOVE to know what you think: wether you disagree, wether you agree, what features you would like to see, if you would like to use the app for free, if you would like to swipe your card for it or if you have any other questions about our work on AWS. Let us know!

Here are some sneak preview screenshots: