Cloud Recommender is a cloud optimization tool from Extreme Scale Solutions that helps save money on your cloud expenditures through analysis and automation.
Cloud Recommender is a cloud optimization tool from Extreme Scale Solutions that helps save money on your cloud expenditures through analysis and automation. It provides recommendations that you may view and act upon easily. Please note that currently, Cloud Recommender only supports AWS. AWS In order to query your AWS environment, Cloud Recommender will ask you to create a CloudFormation stack that grants access to a role that Cloud Recommender will use.
In order to use Cloud Recommender, you’ll need to create a new account. Go to the signup page, provide your name and e-mail address, create a password, and click on “Sign up”. Once you’ve done that, click the link that appears to enter the main application. Sign in with the e-mail address and password that you just provided. Upon your first sign-in, you’ll be notified that you need to verify your e-mail address.
In order to utilize Cloud Recommender, you must have at least one cloud added to your account. You may add a cloud through the Clouds screen by clicking on the “Add Cloud” button. Cloud Recommender currently supports AWS clouds. AWS In order to query your AWS account for data, Cloud Recommender needs an IAM role with read permissions to various AWS services. We provide an Amazon CloudFormation template that you can use to set everything up.
The dashboard shows information about the number of recommendations and their potential savings, as well as a breakdown of your projected spending and what that could be if our recommendations were applied. Recommendations The recommendations table shows a summary of the current projected cost the savings to be had by accepting our recommendations. This summary may be optionally broken down by type or region. Each row shows: The current cost; how much you are currently going to spend over the next 30 days on this item.
The Clouds screen shows the list of all clouds in the account. Many accounts will have only a single cloud, but you may have multiple clouds due to redundancy, isolation, or acquisitions. Here, you can see the status of each cloud and when our last update was. Cloud Recommender currently attempts to update its data on a cloud once per day. Clicking on the name of a cloud will take you to the Cloud Detail screen for that cloud.
Recommendations are at the heart of Cloud Recommender. We make three categories of recommendations: Savings; this recommendation will save you money (and optionally capacity) with no real loss in performance. Performance; this recommendation will increase performance but will likely cost more money. Current; this recommendation represents the current state of the resource in question. When Cloud Recommender makes recommendations, it will always provide a “current” recommendation against which to compare the others.
Address recommendations are straightforward: we recommend keeping any address that doesn’t cost you money, and we recommend deleting any that is unused and costing money. Addresses may be inexpensive individually, but they can account for a significant cost if left unattended. In AWS, addresses cost you money if any of the following conditions apply: The address is attached to an instance that is not running. The address is attached to a network interface that is not attached to an instance.
Instance recommendations aim to save money while optimizing CPU and memory utilization. Even if you think that your instances are sufficiently sized to meet your workload, you may be missing out on savings that you could achieve by downsizing, moving to newer instance families, or moving to better-optimized instance families. Note that in order for Cloud Recommender to obtain memory utilization information, you’ll have to install the AWS CloudWatch Agent on your instances.
Load balancers are often a critical part of building a cloud application, but they can end up costing you a lot of money if not utilized efficiently. How we find the best savings In general, only one load balancer of any given type type is needed within a region, barring some limitations on listeners, target groups, etc. However, we understand that many tools, including Elastic Beanstalk, will create their own load balancers as part of their deployment strategy.
Snapshots can be an effective backup strategy, but their ease of use also makes them easy to forget about. You are charged by the number of unique blocks among all of your “related” snapshots. Snapshots are “related” if they are snapshots of the same volume. Examples Note that AWS treats fully empty blocks as not existing for the purposes of cost. If you create a snapshot of a 0-block volume, this snapshot will cost you nothing, since there are no blocks at all in the snapshot.
Volumes correspond to disks in virtual machine. Generally, when a virtual machine is deleted, all of its volumes are, as well, but this is not a requirement. Usually, unattached volumes should be deleted to save money, but there are situations where they are desired. Volumes can be used as external storage and detached from one instance and attached to another at a later date. Volumes can also be moved between instances as part of an upgrade or some other maintenance.