Labor Day weekend: Is your AWS cloud under control?

31.08.2012
What happens behind the scenes in your cloud over Labor Day Weekend? Before you start thinking about lighting up the BBQ, make sure that your AWS cloud is under control and not creating unexpected surprises for Tuesday morning.

AWS offers an amazing pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure solution. Yet finding the right balance between configuring and maintaining a cloud that is ready to meet your exact business needs can be a challenge in itself.

Since we launched our private beta of 'KnowYourCloud Analytics'Newvem Analytics, a tool that makes AWS analytics easy and cost effective, we've analyzed nearly 900 unique AWS clouds and have seen significant parallels between waste and holiday events.

On Memorial Day weekend, we discovered on average, a 12% increase in the amount of idle instances across our users' clouds, as well as a 10% increase in instances with idle CPU. For heavy users, just one of these small changes can easily result in $10Ks in wasted spend. More importantly, you probably won't find out about, let alone be ready to handle, a potential problem until Tuesday morning.

For this Labor Day Weekend, how can you ensure you won't underspend if demand ramps up? And, conversely, how can you ensure you won't overspend if business slows down over the holiday?