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".
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 ?
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
Using the standard/dominant solution is not a bad way of making a choice in a market that is still uncertain and not stable. When there is so much uncertainty, it is not about which cloud provider is going to give me more performance or capacity per dollar, but which one is going to be around a couple of years from now or going to evolve to meet your needs. AWS just keeps churning out new services and functionality while everybody else tends to be stuck on basic starting/stopping/resizing VMs functionality
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.
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.
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".