CloudCheckr Review

So as I’ve progressed to living in the Visual Studio and Microsoft Windows eco system to using a Mac and Xamarin building cross platform apps to also being a head of devops and using the Amazon Web Services Cloud to setup 3 new start ups now there have been some tools and services that have stayed with me and improved and been a vital part of my toolbox.
CloudCheckr is one such tool and has come on in leaps and bounds since I started using it for a single use case back in the day so I thought I would post about this application and what it did for me then. I went from the free use teir to a paid one I think its that good even though I am just using it to monitor some personal projects.

Best Practices

My first and still an important use case as I was getting to know AWS was best practises. Is my cloud setup secure, available and am I under or over usage?
This was and is still a very useful tool as it’s easy to forget to lock something down or forget that you fire up 1000 servers somewhere as a test.
Have I left ports open? Having a service send you best practises is worth every penny spent.

Spend Optimization

This was next up once I knew things were secure. Getting warning and potential cost savings especially important with start ups was invaluable.

More Features

Since then they have added new features which are explained better on their website so I shall finish by just linking off to them and suggest you give them a free trial you will not be disappointed.


Home Page

Cost Allocation

Resource Reporting

You Tube Video

amazon-workspaces-review

Amazon Workspaces

So during an insomniac night I had a play with Amazon’s new workspaces feature that provides a fully managed virtual desktop experience fully controlled from their web based console.
Being a long term but ex windows guy now I am quite interested in the possibilities of pay as you go and more active directory linked virtualised machines now provided by Amazon for testing and one off tasks but the value for everyone from one man operations to something much larger are clear.
They have a very good Workspaces intro
With more detailed information available
So using the closet data centre to me I created a workspace using the web console by providing a username and email address and about 20 minutes later it was provisioned and I got the intro email with all the information I needed to connect to my instance.

Once I followed the instructions and entered the password I got to download the client from this page

Being on a mac I downloaded and installed the mac installer and was soon connected to a very fast desktop client machine.

A very nice experience indeed Not the most complete test but it is very late and I am very tired right now. More later on this new and shiny feature.