AWS Monitor Portal and other projects.

As my grandfather used to say: no one will honor you if you don’t honor yourself.

So.. a few words about my recent accomplishments in the world of software development.

Many people heard about Elastic Cloud Gate for AWS, some may even use it. For me, seeing it was an unforgettable experience. A ‘nice’ ASP interface from the 90’s, small fonts, lots of clicking around. Their software does have a lot of functionality, most of which however duplicates AWS Console. Their killer feature for us was scheduling AMI backups and other standard AWS tasks such as reboots. The outdated used interface of the eCG remains their huge issue - if you ever used the eCG you would prefer to set it to the auto mode and never see again (here and here).

Meet the guy who single-handedly designed and developed a product to fully replace the eCloudGate for the company he works for, and for many customers of ours. This has not only saved our company $2,500+/mo, but also lots of support time and countless frustration moments. Not mentioning that we can now pocket some profits by offering the service to our customers.

I won’t go into many details here what my software can do especially if you are already familiar with the eCloudGate website. What is notable is that my product besides doing scheduled EC2 AMI and DR backups also helps people manage AWS WorkSpaces. Last time I checked the eCG did not do anything for WorkSpaces besides reboots.

AWS WorkSpaces are virtual Windows Desktop machines offered by Amazon AWS for individual and business needs. Users can run any software they want on them much as on their own Desktops, but without fear of ever losing data due to virus or encryption attacks. Superior recovery is not the only strong side of the WorkSpaces, their speedy performance and easy maintainability make them grow in demand in the corporate world.

In short, the company I work for helps customers migrate their networks to AWS VPCs and Desktops to WorkSpaces. Besides that, our company itself owns hundreds if not thousands of EC2 instances under many departmental AWS accounts. Thanks to me and my software we now have a centralized portal to support and manage thousands of machines… and even make some money on that.

A few ‘killer’ features of my AWS Monitor Tool:

- simple and responsive user interface (here and here),
- separate administrative, customer-level , and user-level accounts,
- remote control and scripting of WorkSpaces and EC2 instances (here),
- WorkSpace and EC2 instance support and management:  real-time ‘heartbeat’ and inventory, scheduled backups and other tasks,
- and a popular feature: users can reboot their own WorkSpaces via a Text Message (SMS) (here).

Some stats as of today: my AWS monitor database is gaining 2-3 million records daily into its SQL databases.

Drop me a note if you want to find out more..

outdated eCG interface

outdated eCG interface