What does DigitalOcean offer?

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider that offers an infrastructure platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS). It simplifies the complexities of the cloud, so developers can focus their time and energy on building great software.

DigitalOcean is very popular with open source developers and competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Azure. To deploy DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment, developers launch a private virtual machine (VM) instance, which DigitalOcean calls a “droplet”.

As DigitalOcean says, the simple UI, CLI, APIs, and documents allow you to spend time on the business, while DigitalOcean focuses on the infrastructure.

DigitalOcean purpose is to penetrate and gain market share in markets such as Spain and Spanish-speaking markets. We are proud to be one of the first partners of DigitalOcean in Spain (and speaks Spanish) being the engine and reference for new collaborations.

This provider is designed for developers and built for businesses and offers:

• A simple platform
• Predictable prices
• World class service

What product does DigitalOcean offer?

• Compute: DigitalOcen provides you with flexible server configurations sized for any application, industry-leading price-performance, and predictable pricing.

• Storage: Store and quickly access any amount of data reliably in the cloud. They offer several types of storage according to the needs of each one.
• Networking: Secure and control traffic to your apps with your own private network, traffic filtering, and load balancing.

• Databases: DigitalOcean Managed Databases is a fully managed, high-performance database cluster service. Using managed databases is a powerful alternative to installing, configuring, maintaining, and protecting databases. Clusters include daily backups with point-in-time recovery (PITR), standby nodes for high availability, and end-to-end SSL encryption. They currently offer four fully managed database engines: MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis to give your application the performance it needs, without the operational demands of building and running your own database server.

• Development tools: Manage resources programmatically and integrate the entire developer ecosystem. (API, Client Libraries, CLI)
• Administrative tools: Supervision and management.

The DigitalOcean community is made up of people from all over the world (Global Community) who are driven to develop software and want to grow their business in the cloud.

DigitalOcean offers several solutions for every need: It offers from Easy and Reliable Web Hosting, Reliable Web and Mobile App Building, Game Development, Fast, Reliable and Easy to Use Cloud VPN, Run Big Data Batch and Streaming Workloads, SaaS Development, Agency Stores and Web Developers and Managed Cloud Hosting, simple and cost-effective.

Industry Leading Bandwidth Pricing

Do more with less complexity

How do I know if it is the ideal provider for me?

If you meet the following characteristics, it means that DigitalOcean is for you.

About Geko Cloud

We currently work with more than 40 clients internationally, and a team of professionals certified in different cloud providers and DevOps technologies, offering a range of services to adapt to the needs of our customers and help transform their businesses. At Geko Cloud we analyse your infrastructure to improve the automation and internal processes, so that the deployment of your application is agile, efficient, and secure.These improvements accelerate time to market and result in achieving your KPIs.

Unlike other companies, we do not work exclusively with any cloud service provider. We are free to adapt to the needs of our clients and we introduce ourselves to their methodologies and work philosophy. Direct contact and proximity to our clients is a fundamental pillar of our service, which is why we work as a part of their internal team.

We want to help you achieve your goals! Shall we talk?

La entrada Geko Cloud official partners of DigitalOcean se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

What is Azure?

 Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform offering a number of cloud services, such as computing, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications in the public cloud. Azure offers 4 different forms of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless.

Advantages of using Azure

Each cloud provider has a series of characteristics that make it better than other competitors, in the next point we will explain some of the advantages of migrating to the cloud with Azure and that can help you clear up some doubts, such as whether this platform in the cloud adapts to your needs.

• PAY-PER-USE: Like AWS, Microsoft charges for Azure on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning you don’t need to maintain any hardware or invest in new infrastructure to grow your business, and you only pay for what you use.
• 22% of the cloud market: Microsoft Azure has grown to become the second of the top three public cloud platforms, just behind market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ahead of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). AWS has the largest market share, but Azure has the most regions, and GCP is growing rapidly.
  
• Security: Azure is secure. Instead of having all your data on-premises, it’s in the cloud, which means you don’t have to worry about hackers trying to access your data on-premises. Microsoft is responsible for the security of the infrastructure, and has several measures in place to ensure that its solutions remain secure.
  
• Scalable: Azure can grow with your business or shrink quickly if you need to downsize.
• Service offerings: Azure has a wide variety of service offerings that continue to grow every day such as analytics, identity and access management tools, and IoT solutions. Since Microsoft has been supporting on-premises customers for more than 40 years, it has an extensive hybrid cloud offering to bring all of its existing customers to the cloud. They also have very good integration with existing tools and technologies such as Visual Studio, Active Directory, and File Storage.

Azure vs AWS

Currently, among the most important cloud providers that exist in the market, AWS is in the first place, followed by Azure, so it is not surprising that comparisons are made between these two large companies. Some of the differences are:

• Database: AWS uses a relational database as a service using RDS, while DynamoDB uses it for NoSQL and for caching uses Elasticache. Meanwhile, Azure uses SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL database for relational database, it makes use of Cosmos DB for NoSQL solutions and Redis Cache for caching.
  
• Open Source Developers: AWS is great for open source developers as it embraces Linux users and offers various integrations for different open source applications. Azure, meanwhile, offers users the ability to use their currently active directory to log in to the Azure cloud platform and run the .net framework on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
• Networking: Azure offers a virtual network through which we can create isolated networks, subnets, route tables, range of private IP addresses just like in AWS.
• Storage:  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Azure Blob Storage are the competing object storage services. Despite the variation in terminology used to describe their services, they offer similar functionality. Each object is stored in an assembly unit, and has a unique key and an associated metadata record that contains the pertinent information: object size, last modified date, media type, and so on.
  

If you want to know more about the differences between these two providers, in our post “AWS vs Azure”, we give you more details.

Azure pricing and costs

Switching to a new cloud provider, price is an important factor to consider that also raises many questions and concerns. Like other public cloud providers, Azure offers a lot of different services, products, and locations. All at different prices.

Azure-native tools like Azure Cost Management can help you monitor, visualize, and optimize your cloud spend. It is also possible to use third-party tools, such as Cloudability or RightScale, to manage the use of Azure resources and the associated costs.

If you want to know an estimate on Azure prices, we recommend you read our colleague Antonio’s post Azure: Cost estimation and best practices | Gecko Cloud

Azure and Geko Cloud 

Microsoft Azure enables businesses and individuals to build, run, and manage applications and solve various technical challenges with flexibility across multiple clouds and on-premises data centers.

At Geko Cloud we are cloud experts and we work with DevOps methodology, accompanying our clients throughout the process from migration to cloud management. Contact us without any commitment!

La entrada What is Azure? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Today, millions of organisations are leveraging AWS cloud services to build sophisticated applications that help them increase reliability, flexibility and scalability. This post on “What is AWS?” is designed to help you gain an in-depth understanding of this popular cloud platform, its benefits, services and more.

What is AWS and what is it for?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud services platform that offers a mix of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) packages from dozens of data centres and multiple availability zones (AZs) in regions around the world. Each AZ contains multiple data centres. Customers can configure virtual machines and replicate their data across multiple AZs to provide a system that is highly resilient to server or data centre failure.

AWS aims to enable organisations to grow and profit through its wide range of services. With this platform, they can store, access, and manage their business data while protecting it from unauthorized access.

What services/products does AWS offer?

Within all the services offered by AWS, we find various cloud computing products, databases, blockchain, application integration, internet of things, migration and transfer, networking and content delivery, and many more. Some of the most widely used Amazon Web Services technologies are:

1. Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2‘s web interface is used to reduce costly physical servers by creating virtual machines and managing other server features, such as storage, security, ports, etc. With Amazon EC2 you can create servers in minutes with your preferred operating system.

2. Amazon RDS
Amazon helps us in every way it can to make our infrastructure less complicated, which is why it provides us with the RDS service. By using this AWS service, dedicated database instances can be created in a matter of minutes, fully managed by the AWS support team and capable of supporting multiple database engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, and many more.

3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon S3 is AWS‘s core service for file storage and retrieval via an API (Application Programming Interface). Amazon S3 offers a file storage service as well as high-quality integrations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH and FedRAMP so that data is not compromised. In addition, the S3 service offers you different types of storage to optimise the cost.

4. Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront helps you improve website speed and access to data in the cloud. It also manages all user content efficiently through a global content delivery service.

5. Amazon VPC
If you are ready to isolate your entire IT infrastructure from exposure, then the only way to do it is with Amazon VPC. This service creates a virtual private network that cannot be accessed by anyone or anything except the people and systems you authorise. These networks are logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS clouds.

6. Amazon SNS
SNS is a Simple Notification Service that alerts subscriber services to automatically perform tasks in response to specified triggers. Amazon SNS is a notification system that offers integration with any type of application, be it PHP, Python, Node, etc; and notifications can be sent to all types of users whether on the web or mobile.

7. AWS Lambda
Is your server getting saturated with requests? AWS Lambda is designed to scale to handle any traffic load. It is possibly one of the most innovative services on AWS, as it allows you to run your code in a serverless way, i.e. without the need to manage servers. In addition, it is compatible with the main programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, and more.

8. AWS Autoscaling
If you are looking to grow or expand your application to millions of users then AWS Autoscaling is the solution. This tool allows you to manage a fleet of servers when your application demands it, creating multiple instances when needed. The service is free, only charged for the number of instances used.

9. AWS Beanstalk
AWS Beanstalk was created to help developers manage website infrastructure and save time. This tool automates the installation, configuration and provisioning of other AWS services such as EC2, RDS and S3.

As you can see, AWS has a large number of services related to cloud infrastructure, related to data and the use of this data for any business, of any size and sector. If you want to know more about all the products offered by AWS, click on the following link to get all the information: Cloud Products (amazon.com)

Advantages of using AWS

Many companies, small or large, rely on AWS for the wide range of services it offers. Here are some of the most notable advantages that differentiate it from other companies. These are:

SECURITY
Security is one of the most important issues when working in cloud environments. AWS has dozens of data centres around the world that are continuously monitored 24/7 and strictly maintained. In addition, AWS has certifications and accreditations, encryption of data at rest and in transit, hardware security modules and strong physical security.

PAY PER USE
One of the most important advantages is the AWS pay-as-you-go billing model. There is no upfront cost to build a storage system and no need to estimate usage. For organisations that have daily or seasonal peaks, this is a real advantage.

WIDE RANGE OF SERVICES
Over time, AWS has expanded its range of products and services to more than 175 products ranging from basic storage and computing to more specialised services such as robotics. In short, AWS offers such a wide variety of services that there is bound to be a product or service that fits your business needs perfectly.

COST-EFFECTIVE
Whether you are a start-up or a large enterprise organisation, you can benefit from the economic advantages that AWS offers, such as not having to pay upfront to use its services or resources.

GLOBAL LEADER
Amazon Web Services has networks in nearly 190 countries around the world and supports more than one million active customers. Its customers include large enterprises and public sector organisations. As businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, the choices of cloud-based services continue to multiply. However, only a handful of options manage to meet the different business needs that exist, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

How does AWS work?

First of all, you need to register with AWS. When you go to create your account, you will be asked for your credit card details. Once your account is created, you can start exploring the AWS management console and view its services. You can also watch 10-minute tutorials on Amazon to learn how each of their products works.

AWS and Geko Cloud

At Geko Cloud we are cloud experts and we work with DevOps methodology, accompanying our customers throughout the process from cloud migration to cloud management. Contact us with no commitment!

La entrada ¿What is AWS? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

In simple terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive.

Concept 

Cloud computing, popularly called «cloud», is the provision of different services over the Internet, which are on physical or virtual servers, and which are maintained and controlled by a cloud provider. These resources include tools and applications such as data storage, servers, databases, networks, and software.  

Within the cloud, there are services that we can make use of, as we will see below (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS), but before we move on to the next point we leave you with an explanatory video on “What is Cloud Computing?” explained by Simplilearn.

Cloud variants: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

If you are considering migrating to the cloud, you should be aware of the three main service models in cloud computing and have a good understanding of their characteristics in order to choose the one that best suits your company’s needs.  

SaaS (Software as a Service)

This service model is the most widespread cloud variant, a distribution model that delivers software applications over the Internet. At this level, you don’t need to know anything about technology, unlike PaaS or IaaS platforms. Users can access SaaS applications and services from anywhere and on any device, as long as we have internet. One of the best-known examples of the SaaS model is the Microsoft Office 365 application.

PaaS (Platform as a service)

Cloud platform services, also known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), are based on IaaS environments.  Users access these tools via the Internet through APIs, web portals or gateway software. PaaS provides a framework for developers to build on and use to create customized applications. Common PaaS providers include AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Google App Engine.  

IaaS (Infraestructura como servicio)

IaaS providers, such as AWS, consist of highly scalable and automated computing resources, i.e. they provide a virtual server instance and storage, as well as APIs that allow users to migrate workloads to a virtual machine (VM) and allow customization of instances, for various workload needs.

In short, the benefits of the cloud are that there is no need to invest in hardware, is scalable and the services can be tailored to the needs of your business.

Types of cloud

Public Cloud

Public platforms are third-party providers that offer computing resources over the Internet. Users do not have to do anything or buy anything, because the entire infrastructure is owned by the company or provider, which takes care of support and upgrades. In addition, services are paid for on a subscription basis, which reduces the need to invest large amounts of capital and frees up your internal IT resources.  

Private cloud

A private platform is unique to a single organization. Broadly speaking, it is a cloud service designed only for the end-user, usually located in an on-site data center or hosted by an external service provider. The private cloud can be associated with Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud.

Hybrid cloud

It is the combination of private cloud structures with public cloud integration, providing greater flexibility by moving workloads between different cloud solutions as needs and costs fluctuate, as well as helping to optimise infrastructure, security and compliance. Learn more about the benefits of migrating to hybrid cloud.

Advantages of migrating to the cloud

If you are considering migrating to the cloud, but before you make the switch, it is important to ask yourself the question: “Am I ready? Here we explain the main advantages of taking this step:  

• • Pay-per-use: You only pay for the resources and workloads you use.
  • Disaster recovery: An important advantage of the cloud is data backup, i.e. the cloud can help you protect your files. In case of emergency, such as natural disasters or power outages, data can be recovered quickly.
  • Lower cost:  Using cloud infrastructure can reduce costs, as you don’t have to invest large amounts of money in buying and maintaining equipment: hardware, facilities, utilities or building large data centres.
  • Scalability: A cloud environment offers companies scalability and flexibility since it does not require such high performance in terms of data processing and storage. In this way, companies can add or subtract resources according to their needs. As businesses grow, your system will grow with them. 
  • Elasticity: is one of the key defining characteristics of cloud computing. Enterprises can scale up the capacity they have in the cloud and the resources available as computing needs increase, and scale down again when demand decreases.
  • Availability 24/7: A cloud infrastructure maximises business productivity and efficiency by ensuring that your application is always accessible, enabling easy collaboration and sharing between users in multiple locations.
  • Multi-tenancy: allows many users to share the same physical infrastructures or the same applications, while maintaining privacy and security over their own data in a flexible manner. This enables cost reduction through economies of scale.

If you finally want to make the jump to the cloud, in our post “Steps to take before migrating to the cloud” we explain some of the things to think about before migrating to the cloud.

Choosing a cloud provider

Today, there is a wide variety of cloud providers offering cloud services. When considering a cloud service provider, you must take into account certain considerations, in the following link we explain some keys to choose the best cloud provider. Below are some of the most important and well-known cloud providers:

Why choose Geko Cloud?

As you can see, cloud computing is very complex, so to make the most of the advantages offered by the cloud it is important to have a team of experts in cloud infrastructure and development. The Geko team has experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.

In this post you can read about the advantages of outsourcing DevOps, as well as having a team to manage your migration to the cloud.

La entrada What is the cloud? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

If you are considering moving your platform to the cloud, especially in these times where we work more time from home, be sure to read this post and discover the keys to choosing the best cloud solution provider for your business.

Data security

When selecting a cloud provider, it is important to know that it complies with all the regulatory security criteria based on the protection and sovereignty of data as dictated by the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation), in addition, such data must be encrypted both in transit and in storage. Another point to keep in mind is the security certifications held by the cloud solution provider, such as ISO 27001 or ISO 9001. 

There are a number of services that already provide these end-to-end encryption elements implemented as standard, and you will need to know their specifications to implement them correctly, such as bulk data volumes, databases, communications and many others.

In addition, if you are involved in transactions that involve management of payments and confidential data, you are likely to need a PCI-certified provider.

Reliability and Performance

When choosing a cloud service provider, you should first ensure that they have a contingency plan to guarantee uninterrupted service in case of a service breakdown. Knowing this information is of vital importance, as it can lead to loss of customers and loss of revenues.

At this point, the great majority of public cloud providers have several availability zones. We recommend consulting the network topology to find out both the availability zones and the regions of your cloud provider, not only to show their magnitude but also to find out the availability to grow in infrastructure at a global level in order to be close to your end user.

There are several methods to find out how the supplier copes during the downtimes. One of them is to know their SLA for the last 6 to 12 months. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is an agreement that specifies the services that the cloud provider must offer, such as their response times in case they have to block an attack. This information is usually published, but if this is not the case, they must provide it on request. 

Technical support

Cloud environments are quite complex, so it is important to have a qualified technical staff that can adapt to specific needs, address security issues or support you in the process of deployment and migration to the cloud. 

This point is vital for the peace of mind of your business. Keep in mind that in the situation of a disaster or service discontinuity, working with a cloud provider offers many tools but also makes physical access to its platform impossible, so there will be a moment when you will be at the mercy of its support team, its reliability, transparency and level of maturity.

Infrastructure

The cloud infrastructure is composed of a set of elements: storage, network, hardware, and so on. From this point, we can differentiate between public cloud, private cloud or the combination of both, the hybrid cloud. The current trend is to migrate to hybrid cloud infrastructures, as they include the most important aspects of the previous solutions. One of the characteristics of the hybrid cloud is the storage of data, which is divided between local infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. 

As we mentioned previously, it is very important to know the size and volume of the services to get an idea of the maturity, reliability and growth possibilities that a cloud service provider can offer us. In terms of services, it is very important to know which services are we hosting in the cloud in order to know which services we’ll need to exploit in each case, and see if we are choosing the best provider in each case: Deploying a website in a CMS is not the same as deploying a machine learning platform or a marketplace…

Pricing and transparency

One of the most important points is obviously the monthly cost of using the selected cloud services. The calculators offered by cloud providers, as our clients explain to us, are not as simple and transparent as they could be. Let’s remember that the cloud allows us to grow and eliminate obvious operating costs quickly and resoundingly in exchange for a passed cost, but what do we have to take into account to calculate the costs in advance and have predictability? It’s a good question, cloud costs are affected by a variety of factors such as: volume of storage space, bandwidth, requests per second, outgoing traffic, communications between VPCs, and so on. 

At this point it is necessary to have the advice of specialists who have experience in this area and above all to see if it is a model that fits our pocket and the status of the project.

Finally, in case you are considering different cloud provider options, our cloud and DevOps experts can help you choose the option that best suits your business needs. At Geko we work with different cloud providers, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. In addition, if you need more information, we have compared some characteristics of two of the three most popular cloud providers in our post “AWS vs AZURE, which one should I choose?“, where you will learn some of the differences. 

If you want an expert team to be by your side in the cloud migration process, Geko is the solution. We are a team specialised in cloud development of cloud infrastructures that will advise you on all technologies and will guide you throughout the process from migration to cloud implementation for your company.

Contact us!

La entrada 5 Keys to choosing the best cloud provider se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

While this post may be a bit basic, we think it may help those who have some early questions, as well as help some companies save some money when starting out in the cloud. In “the basics of cloud cost efficiency” you will learn how to economize your cloud costs in testing and pre-production environments on Amazon Web Services using simple AWS CLI commands.

Normally, most of the infrastructure costs are related to the computational capacity of the servers. In AWS, when we talk about compute capacity, we talk about EC2 instances, where the cost depends only on the actual hours you use on each instance. Also, a larger instance in terms of computational capacity is logically more expensive. It is quite common to use testing and pre-production servers only during business hours, as it makes no sense to have these kinds of environments running 24 hours a day. For this reason, it is interesting, in terms of cost efficiency in the cloud, to take advantage of how easy it is to start and stop instances in the AWS cloud. For example, you can stop all instances overnight and restart them in the morning. There are two different approaches:

• Long distance instances (not autoscaling)
• Instances within groups Autoscaling (ASG)

Cost efficiency in the cloud: long-haul instances

For long-running instances, we can use a simple bash script that can be scheduled to run in a cronjob. This cron would use AWS CLI commands to stop specific instances. Imagine that all your instances within an AWS account are tagged with the “Environment” tag, with different values depending on the environment they depend on: production, pre-production, and testing. The script will simply check which instance IDs have a specific tag (“Environment = Preproduction” for example), and once it has their IDs, we’ll use the AWS API to send a stop signal to these EC2 instances. The script might look something like the following:

instances_ids=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --filter Name=tag:Environment,Values=preproduction --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].InstanceId' --output text)
aws ec2 stop-instances --instance-ids $instances_ids

In the previous command, we are filtering by environment label, and once we have all the information of the different instances, we will use JMESPath to get only the instance ID. Once we have it, we will send a stop-instance command to all these instances.

To start them, we have another script that executes the start-instances command:

instances_ids=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --filter Name=tag:Environment,Values=preproduction --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].InstanceId' --output text)
aws ec2 start-instances --instance-ids $instances_ids

Cost efficiency in the cloud: Autoscaling clusters

For instances within an ASG (AutoScaling Group), the approach will be different due to the fact that, if you turn off an instance within an ASG, the ASG will replace it with a new one.

The ASG configuration has three different values corresponding to the number of instances within an ASG:

• Minimum: minimum number of instances within an ASG
• Maximum: maximum number of instances within an ASG
• Desired: actual number of instances, which will be between the minimum and maximum, depending on the autoscaling group policies and the usage of EC2 instances.

Imagine you have an autoscaling group with 4 instances (minimum=4, desired=4, maximum=8). In this case, instead of stopping instances, what you could do is to reduce the number of instances to zero (minimum and desired = 0) at night, and restore the normal values in the morning (increasing the minimum and desired = 4).

In order to execute these actions, we will again use some of the available AWS CLI commands. In this case we will use what are known as “ASG scheduled actions“. These scheduled actions are based on universal cron expressions, where we have to use the UTC time zone. We will create two scheduled actions, the first one executed in the evening:

aws autoscaling put-scheduled-update-group-action --scheduled-action-name 'scale-down-night' --auto-scaling-group-name ASG-NAME --region eu-west-1 --recurrence '0 18 * * *' --min-size 0 --desired-capacity 0

The above command, executed only once, will create a scheduled action called “scale-down-night” that AWS will execute recurrently every day at 18:00 UTC (note that the rule is triggered at 19:00 in Spain because it was in UTC +1 at that time), and will decrease the number of ASG instances to 0.  And this next one would be executed in the morning:

aws autoscaling put-scheduled-update-group-action --scheduled-action-name 'scale-up-morning' --auto-scaling-group-name ASG-NAME --region eu-west-1 --recurrence '0 7 * * *' --min-size 4 --desired-capacity 4

Be aware that once you have increased the number of instances inside the ASG, the autoscaling policies will again decide the actual number of instances needed (desired value) depending on the ASG load (e.g. CPU utilization). CloudWatch alarm-based scaling policies define how ASGs scale out or scale in.

Conclusion

These are very simple AWS CLI commands to start/stop instances easily, to save costs in AWS test/dev environments, and of course, there are usually more elements to worry about in a full pre-production environment.

However, you can create powerful scripts with more complex logic and intelligence using your favorite programming language. AWS offers different SDKs for practically all programming languages: Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, .Net, Go, C++, Node.js…

I hope you enjoyed this post and I encourage you to check our blog to read other posts that may be of interest to you. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like us to help you with your projects.

La entrada The basics of maximum cost efficiency in the cloud se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.