How cloud management startup NewVem is cutting its clients AWS bills by 25%

http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/09/how-israeli-cloud-management-startup-newvem-is-cutting-its-clients-amazon-web-service-bills-by-25/

by neoswf • 14 years ago

25 13 14 years ago

venturebeat.com

cienrak• 14 years ago

Can someone with experience tell me a little bit about the dashboard AWS provides to clients and why it would be worth paying for an additional service to manage the cloud?

jasonkester• 14 years ago

The AWS dashboard is pretty much exactly that: a dashboard. There's gauges you can look at and switches you can use to turn things on and off.

Sounds like these guys are building a little robot that watches the gauges for you and decides when to switch things on and off.

agwa• 14 years ago

> Can someone with experience tell me a little bit about the dashboard AWS provides to clients and why it would be worth paying for an additional service to manage the cloud?

It's really, really complicated. That's partly because I don't think Amazon is particularly good at UI, but largely because AWS lets you do so much. They have taken things that have traditionally been sold together and split them all apart (IP addresses, compute, storage). Heck, they even sell elastic network interfaces now! Also, AWS was largely designed to be controlled through APIs (and that's how the heavyweight customers use it), so there's not much incentive to make the UI good.

But most customers don't need that level of control, yet they're using AWS to run their apps anyways, probably because they have the most market recognition. Now they have to deal with the complexity but without reaping the benefits, which is rather unpleasant. Hence the need for additional services to help them manage it all.

bproper2• 14 years ago

I think you make a great point about the AWS brand. I notice a lot of startups using it because everyone else does, not because they have shopped around to find the best fit for their company.

gabrtv• 14 years ago

The AWS dashboard is a great tool if you're a cloud engineer; it's technical but necessarily so.

As the CTO of OpDemand, I can tell you first-hand that users are willing to pay for a simplified and streamlined AWS management process. Our users want a Heroku-like experience, but they don't want to give up control of their underlying infrastructure.

With that in mind, we focus on tight GitHub integration, a sleek UI (backbone.js/socket.io) and providing a toolbar with 5 dead-simple actions: start, stop, deploy, clone and destroy. We charge for our tool because we save AWS users time and money.

moe3• 14 years ago

NewVem sees a massive opportunity to help companies cut costs and avoid the costly overhead of hiring a full time IT staffer to manage the cloud.

Makes no sense. If you're using cloud-resources then you probably already have an IT staffer on the payroll.

The hard part is not detecting when you're over-/under-provisioned. The hard part is implementing the actual automation beyond "start/stop an instance".

iamondemand2• 14 years ago

I definitely agree with the fact that the "cloud is programmable" and that one of the major challenges is to be able to plan and implement the automation. On the other hand this highly dynamic environment must be controlled in order to be able to track its behavior over time and be able to maintain and improve its rules and automation. In order to do so you must "Know Your Cloud" in matters such as visibility and control. Does that make sense ?

moe3• 14 years ago

Does that make sense ?

Not when you don't have an IT guy. I mean, what is the scenario here? Some contractor left you alone with an elastic EC2 app, that scales magically simply by turning instances on and off? So you have this highly sophisticated application yet nobody who knows how to operate it, nor capacity monitoring? And your best bet is to seek some crummy outside monitoring to aid your... sales-guy(?)... as he pulls the levers?

Seems a little far fetched to me.

If you're a small startup with no tech clue then you're probably deployed on a shrink-wrapped solution (e.g. heroku) to begin with.

I guess I just don't see who they're aiming at here. Their marketing clearly suggests small business with no tech clue; but how did such a business scale to a point where savings are possible in first place then?

bproper2• 14 years ago

Totally not true - plenty of small startups use AWS and do not have a full time IT staffer. They are the ones who could benefit most from the savings.

moe3• 14 years ago

plenty of small startups

Still makes little sense. If you have no IT guy then you're likely not using big resources, simply because you wouldn't know how to set them up.

swah• 14 years ago

Looks nice, but... why is it free?!

iamondemand2• 14 years ago

My name if Ofir (iamondemand.com) and I work at Newvem. We are still in a beta mode so we provide all our service features for free. We decided to have most of the features that you see today (you MUST try it!) in our freemium package and in the future we will have some advanced premium ones.

How cloud management startup NewVem is cutting its clients AWS bills by 25%

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