
How cloud management startup NewVem is cutting its clients AWS bills by 25% - neoswf
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/09/how-israeli-cloud-management-startup-newvem-is-cutting-its-clients-amazon-web-service-bills-by-25/
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moe
_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".

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iamondemand
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 ?

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moe
_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?

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cienrak
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?

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agwa
> 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.

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bproper
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.

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ridruejo
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

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swah
Looks nice, but... why is it free?!

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iamondemand
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.

