Amazon Adds Cloud Monitoring FeaturesAmazon Adds Cloud Monitoring Features

Typically, management functions are the last items added to emerging technologies. Cloud services have become quite popular among small and medium businesses, but they have lacked the management features found with premise applications. So, one of the industrys leading suppliers is trying to change that.Amazon announced a couple of new services designed to increasing the reliability and scalability of its EC2 cloud services. CloudWatch monitors the resources being used by EC2 applications, and Auto Scaling enables companies to dynamically allocate computing resources to applications.

CloudWatch examines items, such as CPU usage, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Users can turn on these monitoring features at any time, use the data to identify bottlenecks, and make changes to improve application performance. With Auto Scaling, businesses set Quality-of-Service parameters, and the Amazon service will automatically expand or constrict its system resources. This feature is helpful for applications that experience a lot of demand volatility, such as ecommerce systems.

Because of their potential to help companies reduce their IT costs and increase application deployment flexibility, cloud services have gained a lot of attention recently. However, these services are new and lack the management capabilities and reliability found with more established technologies. Amazon has taken a few steps to bridge that gap, but more work needs to be done before cloud services offer companies as much reliability and scalability as premises based computing.