Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge is Live!

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, AWS, cloud

Today Amazon have announced on their AWS Blog, via Jeff Barr, the first of the of their proposed renewable energy wind farms is now operational. This marks a significant landmark for the Amazon and  today’s news is the first step towards the goal of 40% renewable energy for their global infrastructure by the end of 2016.

Back in November 2014 AWS made a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for their global infrastructure footprint. Today’s news indicates that the Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge, located in Benton County, Indiana, is now live and producing electricity! This marks the first of the four announced renewable energy projects to move into full operation.

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AWS Snapshots and the benefits of scheduling

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, SaaS, Scheduling

AWS Storage Gateway provides the ability to back up point-in-time snapshots of your data to Amazon S3 for durable recovery. You can use the snapshot backups later on-premises or in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and you can take snapshots on a one-time or scheduled basis. In this blog, we show you the most common tasks that you can perform with snapshots, including creating a snapshot and restoring the snapshot to a volume that can then be mounted as an iSCSI device. When you restore a snapshot to an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume, the volume can then be attached to an Amazon EC2 instance.

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How to keep control of your AWS cloud costs

0 Steven Duff Amazon Web Services, Automation, AWS, cloud management, Cost management

In an interesting recent article by Gavin Clarke in the register, he highlighted that 2015 was the year where AWS became the leader in Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), with Amazon now a major IT infrastructure provider. One of the key reasons AWS has became the leader in this space is the pay-as-you-go pricing model which offers elastic scalability to grow or shrink resource usage based on your business needs and growth.

However, as you start using AWS cloud, you will notice that the costs can spike and spend can creep up with the more services you use. So it’s important to have right cost management tools like CloudRanger that can help with the automated scheduling of tasks, which can help you keep control of your overall AWS costs.

Here, we highlight our top 3 AWS cost saving strategies for your business.

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Weekly summary email feature now live

0 Steven Duff Automation, AWS, cloud management
Summary of the actions performed

CloudRanger carries out a number of tasks for our customers in the background. The tasks we execute can range from starting up servers to performing a back-up. When you combine this with a schedule, then  you have an automated service that looks after your cloud needs. Schedules are used to automate your tasks for you, a timer switch if you like. You can set a schedule to run daily, monthly or yearly. With our new weekly email feature, you will now get a summary of the actions performed over the previous week.

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