{"id":18,"date":"2013-01-02T09:48:07","date_gmt":"2013-01-02T09:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/happy-new-year-resolution-save-money-on-amazo"},"modified":"2013-01-02T09:48:07","modified_gmt":"2013-01-02T09:48:07","slug":"happy-new-year-resolution-save-money-on-amazo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"Happy New Year.  Resolution: save money on Amazon AWS using xlogs."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to xlogs <a href=\"http:\/\/xlo.gs\">http:\/\/xlo.gs<\/a> &#8211; a free tool to help manage the Amazon Cloud.<\/p>\n<p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Xlogs-logo\" height=\"60\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/63a1d-xlogs-logo-scaled500.png\" width=\"133\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Over the course of the last year of so, and in reviewing a number of AWS environments as a consultant, I noticed a couple of interesting things.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An incredible number of EC2 sites on Amazon are virtually completely static<\/li>\n<li>Almost none of these sites are using AWS Reserved Instances<\/li>\n<li>Almost all of them have zombie instances that nobody remembers why they&#8217;re there.<\/li>\n<li>Amazon makes tracking what&#8217;s going on difficult &#8211; to put it mildly<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So xlogs is my one-stop site to help address the following AWS shortcomings:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No logfiles.&nbsp; No simple way to tell when an instance appears, vanishes, starts or stops.<\/li>\n<li>No simple alerts. I want to know when things change.<\/li>\n<li>No simple way to see how much I might save using Reserved Instances.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As someone who&#8217;s taken care of computers for 30 years, I need logfiles.&nbsp; They tell the story of what&#8217;s happening on a machine.&nbsp; Amazon doesn&#8217;t have something like that where I can see at a glance what&#8217;s going on with my instances.<\/p>\n<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/97621-screen_shot_2013-01-02_at_4-45-21_am-scaled1000.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Screen_shot_2013-01-02_at_4\" height=\"367\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/97621-screen_shot_2013-01-02_at_4-45-21_am-scaled1000.png?w=300\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>Ditto Alerting.&nbsp; I wrote the first web-based Systems and Network Monitor, Big Brother &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/bb4.com\">http:\/\/bb4.com<\/a> &#8211; so I really want to know what&#8217;s going on.&nbsp; Even a simple email alert to show me what&#8217;s changed.&nbsp; At least it&#8217;ll remind me I have stuff running on EC2.<\/p>\n<p>And spending?&nbsp; It&#8217;s shocking how much money you can save on Amazon just using reserved instances.&nbsp; Here&#8217;s a sample:<\/p>\n<p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/a7a7b-savingsdemo-scaled1000.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Savingsdemo\" height=\"386\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/a7a7b-savingsdemo-scaled1000.jpg?w=300\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>So here&#8217;s Xlogs &#8211; please let me know if its helpful and please tell me of any bugs.<\/p>\n<p>Happy New Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Welcome to xlogs http:\/\/xlo.gs &#8211; a free tool to help manage the Amazon Cloud. Over the course of the last year of so, and in reviewing a number of AWS environments as a consultant, I noticed a couple of interesting things. An incredible number of &#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=18\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}