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Ansible Configuration Management: Book Review

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Ansible Configuration Management Book

The book provides very good grasp of how to get started and working with Ansible for your small and large setup.

The first few chapters will walk through installation and setting up overlord machine. Creating simple playbooks were systematic as it moves on in using advance techniques of using looping, conditional execution, and task delegation in playbooks.

While the last chapters details how to work with large projects and creating custom modules and external inventories.

Good to have one here!

AWS and Cloud Cost Optimization

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If we we are monitoring our electric bills how much more our AWS usages. 🙂
Energy Usage
Photo Credit: Bart Everson

How to check and balance your AWS detailed usage?

AWS offers Cost Allocation and Tagging which is also describe here.

Another nice project https://github.com/Netflix/ice which also shows nice graph.

But there are also service providers that can do detailed reports and help optimize your AWS setup.
Below is the short list of company that offers usage analysis and reports.

Cloudyn is composed of several products focus on AWS services.
S3 Tracker, EC2 and RDS Optimizer to name a few.

CloudVertical supports multiple cloud cloud, cost and usage analysis and reports.

Newvem support AWS and Window Azure. What I like here is the Cloud Smart Meter for iOS applications.

Cloudability focus on AWS with RI planner, EC2 Usage, Cost Analytics.
The company offers forever free daily report,trend and alerts.

Cloudcheckr offers Cost Metrics and Core services summary, Map Overlay and Heatmaps and a 30 Day Trend reporting for their Free plan.

Update: Oct 1, 2013
Teevity.com is another company who also offers cloud optimization. Their features page show more information.

Have you used other tools/apps or experience with any of these?