

Use Cloudkick To Manage Amazon Web Services’ EC2 (YC W09) - tripngroove
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/03/16/y-combinators-cloudkick-offers-simple-cloud-management-system/

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ShabbyDoo
I am reminded of those who made money in the gold rush by selling picks and
shovels to the miners. Those people are the ones who really made the money.

The service looks cool, btw.

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j2d2
I can't tell if you think the pick and shovel sellers are Amazon or Cloudkick.
They're both selling services towards the greater goal of getting your web
idea off the ground.

But I agree, Cloudkick looks great!

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ShabbyDoo
Good point. Cloudkick is kind of like the guy who sells food to the guy who
sells shovels.

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rjurney
This kind of thing is certainly useful, and I like to see another player in
the game but I don't detect enough differentiation from Scalr, Ylastic or
Amazon's own console, or for that matter the Rightscale console.

My 2 cents, I would work on that. The cross-cloudness is quite nice, though.

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ddispaltro
Thanks for the useful feedback. We do offer a much simpler alternative to the
AWS Console. No more worrying about key management and security groups, focus
on the business. Also we offer graphs that neither the AWS console nor Ylastic
offer that give you a better glimpse into your datacenter.

Regardless, we would love to integrate any ideas you have or any
infrastructure services woes you've experienced or any general shortcomings of
our/other services. Thanks again.

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rjurney
Also... what I really want to be using to control my servers are complex rules
and behaviors defined and controlled by puppet. If you could make that easy to
use on EC2 instances through your console... that would be great!

<http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/>

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goodgoblin
Seems pretty cool - but I am a little worried about handing over my amazon
keys - those things are literally the keys to the kingdom if you are running
your apps with Ec2 and storing data with S3, etc.

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zhyder
Congrats! I'm pleasantly surprised to see you've included Slicehost at launch
as well. A couple of Qs:

1\. Why is it free? I'm more than happy to pay for something like this (altho
I'm wary of relying on a new startup for such mission-critical stuff, see
below).

2\. How did you manage to convince an impressive 40 YC startups to rely on
your service?

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tdavis
Fellow YC companies don't need a lot of convincing for this sort of thing
usually, we pretty much just assume fellow companies are making something
awesome and use it straight off.

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tdavis
Start charging for this. Now. I'm not even using EC2 yet and I want to pay for
it.

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e1ven
Very cool looking service-

My nervousness comes from a few points- It looks very new so far..

How does this generate it's statistics? Is it running the checks back to a
centralized server on their side some place? What's the capacity on that
server- If we threw 1200 EC2 nodes to them tomorrow, would it stay up?

What sort of service/support plans do they offer? It's free, but It'd be
worthwhile to pay to be able to get someone on the phone 24/7. We pay Amazon's
gold support, we'd pay yours if it meant you'd take my calls at 3am.

We normally use Nagios in-house, which is a great application, but has
problems adjusting to dynamic load. This looks very decent, but I worry about
the uptime.

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rjurney
I used Scalr.net for my last startup, and one issue they had twice during the
year I paid them $50 a month was... their entire site went down from a DDOS
attack. Each time they upgraded their hardware and setup, but overall I think
they were running like 98% uptime for the last year. Not quite good enough for
the mainstream.

Scalr literally handles dynamic scaling of your application, so it failing is
a bit worse than this, though.

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numair
Did your instances suffer as a result of this downtime? I've been playing
around with Scalr, haven't really seen any problems as of late... Would love
more input from others who have used / are using the service.

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sanswork
I use scalr at the moment(paid service) we have just under 20 instances spread
among 6 farms. Been using them for about 3 months now with very few problems.
The only major issue I've had is that their DB roles aren't great for large
db's(>100gig) though I think they are working on an SBS one.

As it is I use a modified role to allow SBS but have to muck around too much
for comfort on start ups since the SBS partitions don't always mount at
startup(sometimes up to 10 minutes later) and when they do that the DB init
scripts fail which causes scalr to cycle the instance and start the whole
process over again. That said I've only had to do that twice since I've used
them.

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shafqat
How does this compare to Rightscale? Is there an overlap in services?

Either way, great idea... We'll consider moving to it for my startup
(NewsCred).

EDIT: Also, very interesting that you don't provide much information or
details about your service on the site. Three logos, and three short sentences
at the bottom. I was clicking around trying to find out more, but then
realized I would have to sign up (I didn't yet). But I can see a lot of people
signing up just to take a look.

Was that an intentional strategy? Doesn't it reduce the number of signups or
does it increase? Did you A/B test it?

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browser411
We're beta users of Cloudkick too and these guys are great. The most
impressive thing is that they constantly ask feedback and act on it too--the
hallmark of a company that's going to succeed.

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izak30
This is _great_ took 5 minutes to setup and configure. I am very happy with
this. Honestly, I'm not positive that I'd pay for this, with other freely
available tools around, but it is very good. Great work.

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chime
For the devs: When adding a new provider, you should trim the secret key field
because I kept copy-pasting from Amazon/AWS and it kept putting in a space
character in the beginning of the field.

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ddispaltro
We just deployed that change. Thanks for the feedback!

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trapper
What is the benefit of using this over something like nagios?

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ddispaltro
I'm one of the founders @ cloudkick, and our goal is to eliminate the hassle
of setting up and maintaining your own monitoring install.

Nagios is difficult to set up and get right, we abstract away all the details
and let you simply click to add more monitoring. Its simple and we worry about
the scaling.

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rjurney
Now I'm interested. If you could give me really good graphs of different
aspects of performance, of an entire hadoop compute cluster at once... perhaps
by tying into hadoop... I would love you.

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ddispaltro
We have a bunch of interesting distributed computing problems we are solving
in the pipe, so stay tuned. Nothing out of the box yet...

Currently, we have a pretty unique graphing framework. Basically, you can plot
any bit of data and send it back to the server, but the limitation is you have
to launch the server through us. The feature will be added soon as available
to anyone with a cloud server.

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rjurney
If I have to launch the instance with you, that pretty much makes using it for
compute clusters impossible. One launches those from a script at the shell.

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goodkarma
Looking forward to checking this out. Have been looking at Rightscale but
their fees are steep. Glad to hear Cloudkick could be another option.

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rjurney
Your options for EC2 (that I'm aware of) are:

Rightscale, Scalr, Ylastic, Amazon's own console, and now Cloudkick.

But only Rightscale and Cloudkick are cross-cloud.

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callmeed
Very cool ... I'm looking to add the panda video platform into some apps and
this looks like it might really help.

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judegomila
Love this idea of having such a visual layer on top EC2/slicehost. These guys
have opened up a whole new market.

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rokhayakebe
I think the YC Motto is changing to "Make something others need, and will
likely pay for". I have noticed a real nice improvement in the kind of
companies being funded. In other words from Good to Great concepts.

