Alerts for EC2 through CloudWatch

Monitoring your applications running on Amazon's EC2 platform just got easier. Today, Amazon announced the public availability of CloudWatch for EC2 with Alarms. Instead of having to poll and ask CloudWatch for the current status, you can actually have that information pushed to you instead. This is a much more efficient way to monitor you applications running in the Amazon cloud. Right now the only new alarm that is supported is for Amazon SNS, but this is a huge step forward. Before today, CloudWatch could still trigger an Auto Scaling policy, but with the addition of SNS the doors are really opening up. Using Amazon SNS, you can do almost any type of notification that you would like posting to HTTP/HTTPS, Email, JSON, or directly into SQS. This makes the service very flexible. You are able to monitor CPU Utilization, Average Disk Reads, Average Disk Writes and Network traffic in and out.
Amazon has also enabled a new monitoring tab in the EC2 management console that will allow you to look at the graphs for these elements on each of your EC2 instances. The data only goes back to the 2nd of December since it was just released today, but this will be extremely useful for a quick read on how your instances are performing.

Amazon is certainly hitting things on my wishlist this year. Now if they would only enable CloudWatch and Alarms for metrics on SQS!  Hopefully this is just around the corner. You can read more about the new features and the pricing of CloudWatch on EC2 here.

CloudFront Added to AWS Console

The Amazon Web Services management console has a new addition. A new tab appeared this morning at the top of the console at http://console.aws.amazon.com allowing you to manage your CloudFront distributions.

Using the console, you can choose to create a new distribution, select the bucket from within S3 and add up to 10 CNAME entries for the distribution. This functionality is convenient, but is not the functionality that I would have liked to see added to the console next as you have been able to do all of this with S3Fox for several months now.  I was hoping to see the management functions for CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to appear in the console.  These should be available in the console this year I have been told, but it was wishful thinking to expect them this early in the year.

Amazon Releases New Cloud Computing Services

One of the big draws to the cloud is its ability to scale with your application.  That has become much easier with Amazon Web Services today.  Early this morning the Amazon Web Services team launched three new services: CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing.  Combining the use of these three services allows a user to configure and scale their application based upon information gathered by CloudWatch.  These are important additions to the Amazon Web Services offerings because it helps take more of the coding and configuration work away from the developers and system administrators.  This is a key benefit of cloud computing that AppEngine from Google and Azure from Microsoft have built in and they have kept completely transparent to the developer.  While Amazon has not made it completely transparent with the release of these services, it is a great step and may be exactly the middle ground that is needed.
CloudWatch allows you to monitor CPU utilization, data transfer and disk usage, request rate and traffic to your EC2 instances.  Based up on the information that CloudWatch gathers, you can set triggers that will look at that data over a time period and allow you to use the Auto Scaling to automatically add or remove EC2 instances to the specific group of machines working on a particular task.  Finally the Elastic Load Balancing helps you distribute the traffic coming into your application to your EC2 instances.  This is a welcome addition as it accomplishes fault tolerant load balancing for us without the cost of having to setup several HAProxy instances.  So, even though we incur the costs of using the new Elastic Load Balancing Service, it quickly pays for itself because we are able to remove our own load balancing configuration on EC2.  I am excited to see these new services finally go beta to the public and I am looking forward to more.