Use Cloudkick To Manage Amazon Web Services’ EC2 (YC W09) | Hacker News Reader

Use Cloudkick To Manage Amazon Web Services’ EC2 (YC W09)

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86 pointstripngroove40 comments

I am reminded of those who made money in the gold rush by selling picks and shovels to the miners. Those people are the ones who really made the money.

The service looks cool, btw.

Don't forget the jeans.

I can't tell if you think the pick and shovel sellers are Amazon or Cloudkick. They're both selling services towards the greater goal of getting your web idea off the ground.

But I agree, Cloudkick looks great!

Good point. Cloudkick is kind of like the guy who sells food to the guy who sells shovels.

This kind of thing is certainly useful, and I like to see another player in the game but I don't detect enough differentiation from Scalr, Ylastic or Amazon's own console, or for that matter the Rightscale console.

My 2 cents, I would work on that. The cross-cloudness is quite nice, though.

Thanks for the useful feedback. We do offer a much simpler alternative to the AWS Console. No more worrying about key management and security groups, focus on the business. Also we offer graphs that neither the AWS console nor Ylastic offer that give you a better glimpse into your datacenter.

Regardless, we would love to integrate any ideas you have or any infrastructure services woes you've experienced or any general shortcomings of our/other services. Thanks again.

Be more reliable than Amazon. I know thats hard, but it would be great to not think of my 'amazon portal' as an Achilles heal :)

Also... what I really want to be using to control my servers are complex rules and behaviors defined and controlled by puppet. If you could make that easy to use on EC2 instances through your console... that would be great!

http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/

Seems pretty cool - but I am a little worried about handing over my amazon keys - those things are literally the keys to the kingdom if you are running your apps with Ec2 and storing data with S3, etc.

Congrats! I'm pleasantly surprised to see you've included Slicehost at launch as well. A couple of Qs:

1. Why is it free? I'm more than happy to pay for something like this (altho I'm wary of relying on a new startup for such mission-critical stuff, see below).

2. How did you manage to convince an impressive 40 YC startups to rely on your service?

Fellow YC companies don't need a lot of convincing for this sort of thing usually, we pretty much just assume fellow companies are making something awesome and use it straight off.

Cloudkick works for Heyzap without changing anything we did before. It just gives us more visibility into Slicehost.

Plus I am excited about where they are going.

Start charging for this. Now. I'm not even using EC2 yet and I want to pay for it.

Very cool looking service-

My nervousness comes from a few points- It looks very new so far..

How does this generate it's statistics? Is it running the checks back to a centralized server on their side some place? What's the capacity on that server- If we threw 1200 EC2 nodes to them tomorrow, would it stay up?

What sort of service/support plans do they offer? It's free, but It'd be worthwhile to pay to be able to get someone on the phone 24/7. We pay Amazon's gold support, we'd pay yours if it meant you'd take my calls at 3am.

We normally use Nagios in-house, which is a great application, but has problems adjusting to dynamic load. This looks very decent, but I worry about the uptime.

I used Scalr.net for my last startup, and one issue they had twice during the year I paid them $50 a month was... their entire site went down from a DDOS attack. Each time they upgraded their hardware and setup, but overall I think they were running like 98% uptime for the last year. Not quite good enough for the mainstream.

Scalr literally handles dynamic scaling of your application, so it failing is a bit worse than this, though.

Did your instances suffer as a result of this downtime? I've been playing around with Scalr, haven't really seen any problems as of late... Would love more input from others who have used / are using the service.

No, they just didn't scale during the outage. I do recommend Scalr, its great, but I also tell people that its bleeding edge.

I use scalr at the moment(paid service) we have just under 20 instances spread among 6 farms. Been using them for about 3 months now with very few problems. The only major issue I've had is that their DB roles aren't great for large db's(>100gig) though I think they are working on an SBS one.

As it is I use a modified role to allow SBS but have to muck around too much for comfort on start ups since the SBS partitions don't always mount at startup(sometimes up to 10 minutes later) and when they do that the DB init scripts fail which causes scalr to cycle the instance and start the whole process over again. That said I've only had to do that twice since I've used them.

How does this compare to Rightscale? Is there an overlap in services?

Either way, great idea... We'll consider moving to it for my startup (NewsCred).

EDIT: Also, very interesting that you don't provide much information or details about your service on the site. Three logos, and three short sentences at the bottom. I was clicking around trying to find out more, but then realized I would have to sign up (I didn't yet). But I can see a lot of people signing up just to take a look.

Was that an intentional strategy? Doesn't it reduce the number of signups or does it increase? Did you A/B test it?

We're beta users of Cloudkick too and these guys are great. The most impressive thing is that they constantly ask feedback and act on it too--the hallmark of a company that's going to succeed.

This is _great_ took 5 minutes to setup and configure. I am very happy with this. Honestly, I'm not positive that I'd pay for this, with other freely available tools around, but it is very good. Great work.

For the devs: When adding a new provider, you should trim the secret key field because I kept copy-pasting from Amazon/AWS and it kept putting in a space character in the beginning of the field.

We just deployed that change. Thanks for the feedback!

What is the benefit of using this over something like nagios?

It's not nagios. That alone would be a reason to use it...

I like Nagios, but it's not designed to dynamically add and subtract nodes. It doesn't auto-spawn nodes when you're running over X% CPU on Y% nodes. If this can do that, it's a winner. -CPD

Scalr will do that, but not very reliably so far. As far as I know, Rightscale is the only reliable service that will let you do this, albeit with some work on your part with their images and scripts, but they are out of the price range of most bootstrapped startups at $500 a month and a bigger up front fee.

The auto-scaling based on monitoring is the next logical place for our service to go, but the scaling service isn't complete yet.

I'm one of the founders @ cloudkick, and our goal is to eliminate the hassle of setting up and maintaining your own monitoring install.

Nagios is difficult to set up and get right, we abstract away all the details and let you simply click to add more monitoring. Its simple and we worry about the scaling.

Now I'm interested. If you could give me really good graphs of different aspects of performance, of an entire hadoop compute cluster at once... perhaps by tying into hadoop... I would love you.

Exactly. I didn't think it was clear enough on the front page why you would choose this over any other monitoring solution.

I agree. If cloud monitoring charts as a service is their niche, say so. I'll keep checking back, and I'l buy once its further along.

Its definitely the first iteration of the service with many more to come. This is one of the most basic needs for any production system, the diagnostics side (alerts) and the preventative maintenance side (load graphs). So stay tuned.

We have a bunch of interesting distributed computing problems we are solving in the pipe, so stay tuned. Nothing out of the box yet...

Currently, we have a pretty unique graphing framework. Basically, you can plot any bit of data and send it back to the server, but the limitation is you have to launch the server through us. The feature will be added soon as available to anyone with a cloud server.

If I have to launch the instance with you, that pretty much makes using it for compute clusters impossible. One launches those from a script at the shell.

Looking forward to checking this out. Have been looking at Rightscale but their fees are steep. Glad to hear Cloudkick could be another option.

Your options for EC2 (that I'm aware of) are:

Rightscale, Scalr, Ylastic, Amazon's own console, and now Cloudkick.

But only Rightscale and Cloudkick are cross-cloud.

Very cool ... I'm looking to add the panda video platform into some apps and this looks like it might really help.

Love this idea of having such a visual layer on top EC2/slicehost. These guys have opened up a whole new market.

I think the YC Motto is changing to "Make something others need, and will likely pay for". I have noticed a real nice improvement in the kind of companies being funded. In other words from Good to Great concepts.

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