Ylastic

Ylastic is an amazing product. They are extremely responsive to support issues and new features.

great (and quick) support, great features and quick to bring out new features; definitely recommended

Ylastic has become an valuable service for managing our AWS resources due to the time savings alone. Their support is extremely responsive with any problems quickly solved. Every AWS customer should have an account with Ylastic.

Have been using Ylastic for a bit now, and I have to say it is the most kick ass tool for managing AWS. The number of little things and features built into it surprise me constantly. My team can manage all of the AWS resources, set up monitoring, multiple AWS accounts, mobile version for iphone, android and blackberry, SMS, usage costs, scheduled tasks, IAM support. Prabhakar and his team seem to be constantly updating it. I get emails about updates every week. Ylastic is very cool but what truly sets it apart is the support. I see a bunch of people mentioning it above, but it completely blew me away. Super fast, responsive and know what they are doing. Hey Amazon, these little guys are running rings around your so-called management console. Highly recommended.

Provides the essentials - UI for trigger/autoscaling, monitoring graphs for load balancer and RDS (which something RightScale doesn't provide, at $500/mo), and has great support staff.

Great app. I was a little reluctant to subscribe because I originally just needed to sequence backups by date and intended to write a script to do so myself. But once I had that going in seconds with Ylastic, I discovered a variety of useful tools that I would never have time to write or support myself. Not only that, they're rolling out new features regularly and provide excellent support.

This service is brilliant - so much worth its money. Simple, cool, usefult -0 everything the AWS console should be!

I have been using Ylastic since the beginning and it is a great service, making it so easy to manage our AWS infrastructure. They are constantly improving it and react very quickly to any changes or new features from Amazon. Highly recommended!

I'll try not to duplicate what others have said. Here are the big things: 1. Ylastic has a staff that is extremely responsive and really wants to produde a tool that is useful. Prabhakar is a super-human. 2. Ylastic responds to Amazon feature changes and releases VERY QUICKLY. Before using Ylastic I often had to wait as control panels caught up to new releases. Ylastic will often release an update before I even get a chance to want to use the new feature. 3. Only $25/month. 4. Mobile webkit-optimized site.

This may be boring, but I will add my voice to the resounding applause for this service. Our company adopted Ylastic a few weeks back after bringing up a cloud system using many of the AWS services (S3, SQS, SimpleDB, EC2 with EBS and AutoScaling) and learning to trudge back and forth between S3Fox, ElasticFox, s3cmd, as-cmd, etc etc etc... What we got was a robust integrated dashboard for everything. We can look at SQS and SimpleDB contents, get statistics reports, manage autoscaling, watch instances, migrate AMIs from West to East Coast, create new resources -- all with a consistent visual interface that gives us almost everything we need. Worth mentioning is that their responsiveness is better than ANY service I've ever used. I routinely hear back within 15 minutes (granted, I work during the day - can't be sure what would happen at night) when I post a problem to the site. And this isn't a "we have received your message and will get back to you" - it's a thoughtful response, often from the CTO. Features are frequently added, and so far feature fatigue doesn't seem to have set in - i.e., suggestions still seem to be eagerly considered. It's hard for this kind of support to scale as a company's customerbase grows, so I want to use this opportunity to encourage Ylastic to invest in this as an essential part of the service. But even without that, the solid functionality and "everything in one place"-ness of this service, combined with its agility in keeping up with AWS, has made us very happy. Dana Good, NeuroVista Corporation

This tool provides an excellent feature set that is enhanced on an almost weekly basis. I have also been very impressed with how responsive they are to adding newly requested features.

Having started off using the RightScale developer edition and trying out Scalr for a bit I'm pretty smitten by Ylastic. It's simple, very convenient, and gives me a pretty intuitive interface for doing all my AWS management, for an amazing price. At $25/mo Ylastic is absolutely worthwhile. The one caveat is that I've found the S3Fox and ElasticFox add-ons necessary even with Ylastic, since they provide a more simple management interface for certain things. But RDS management, monitoring of cloudwatch, and managing settings for scaling, load-balancing and RDS groups is just a breeze with Ylastic. Ylastic's support is outstanding - I get responses within a few minutes to all my queries and better yet the bugs I've noticed have been fixed very promptly. As a starting offering as an alternative to RightScale, Ylastic definitely is great. I suspect that as I keep using it their features are just going to keep getting better to the point where I may not need RightScale (keeping fingers crossed).

If you are a consultant managing AWS servers for clients, this is the only product to consider. I've tried RightScale WebSite Edition, Kaavo IMOD and Attribo (beta). All have interesting twists, but In the end, Ylastic does the important tasks well, and does not over engineer. Unlike Kaavo and RightScale, they don't charge in a per hour markup once you have more than a couple of full-time instances running. Like Amazon, they wait for the community to tell them what is needed, and roll out the enhancement faster than you anticipated. They know how to build a site, too. It's fast and always up. Mobile interface is very usable (actually, it's beautiful!) and notifications work in a timely fashion. I use a custom Nagios system for monitoring, but their CloudWatch implementation is outstanding. Lastly, Prabhakar and his team never lets a post on his forum go unanswered.

We've moved from Elasticfox to Ylastic for managing our cloud infrastructure and it's been a breeze. We've evaluated other tools like RightScale and concluded that Ylastic was the best fit for our needs. These guys update fast. Scheduled updates occur about every week. We've experienced a couple of minor issues, which were all solved within 1-2 days by Ylastic deploying a fix. Highly recommended.

We just started using Ylastic and have had a great experience so far. Their development team seems very responsive and it has greatly eased the management of our large server farm. Just the aliasing alone seems worth the price to us

Ylastic gave me lots of freedom I couldn't reach without spending much time on experimenting with the official EC2 Console API. Especially architecting and managing auto-scaling groups is working great thanks mainly to the simple and easy to lookup interface. Simplicity, compared to other high-spec cloud managers is a great value for a non-specialist in server engineering like myself. There are still some features that I would love to see implemented in Ylastic (like integrating S3 managing and having literally all of other API functions included) and being aware that no service is omnipotent, after 3 months of use I think I became a loyal fan of this service. I just hope you guys keep up with the good work!

Feature rich, constantly being improved. Great response time from the Ylastic support team. I wouldn't use AWS without it.

I have been using Ylastic for about 4 months and they update me faster than Amazon when a problem arises with EC2. They respond to requests and are frequently putting updates live. Love the service. Keep up the awesome work.

Positives: setup isn't too difficult multiple AWS account management easy to understand UI ability to add notes to images Many tools available as icons CPU monitor graph visible while viewing instances ability to add and remove visible columns meaningful icons for specific tasks meaningful icons for OS type meaningful icons for regions Negatives: lack of documentation sometimes a little slow cannot edit description of images All in all, this is the best tool I've used to manage AWS cloud accounts.

Long time user of Elasticfox. Switched to Ylastic recently after hearing great things about it at a cloud meetup. Wow! It kicks some serious butt. I can configure and manage all our infrastructure on AWS from one place, including monitoring and alerting. It has a ton of useful features. Especially love the scheduling. It also made our migration to RDS from hosting MySQL ourselves simple. Point and click for everything and nice charting. They just added support for SNS which was only released by Amazon a few days ago! Awesome support. Highly recommended.

So easy and so powerful. Many above have already written about all of greatness of the technical side of Ylastic. But I want to say, that besides that, their support is just great - very fast and responsive. This deserves separate 5 stars. For what they charge monthly - its a great deal! BTW, they gave me 1 week full demo access on request.

Ours is a pretty standard LAMP stack and configuring balancing, EBS and SQL replication was very straightforward using Ylastic. I did a pretty thorough comparison and while Rightscale is definitely prettier and has more in the way of one click automation Ylastic made my deployment easy and was a significant savings over Rightscale.

We recently started using Ylastic to consolidate our AWS management tools, and we found it provides a simple yet powerful interface for monitoring and controlling EC2 instances, S3 buckets and other AWS resources. Their support is responsive and friendly, and on top of that, they are constantly improving their product, with new features added on a regular basis. If you're looking for a great all-in-one AWS management tool, you definitely need to try Ylastic.

We've been using Ylastic for the past month or so as we have built out our usage of AWS. If you're serious about using AWS and are managing more than just a couple of assets, then Ylastic is a must have. Their support is top notch and they are constantly evolving the feature set.

Ylastic is what Amazon's official Console should have been! I've been using Ylastic for three months now and can say assuredly that it has become in invaluable tool for monitoring and managing our EC2 and RDS servers. Their web GUI supports managing virtually every component of Amazon's cloud architecture, and the integrated Cloudwatch graphing is very handy, especially when checking up on alerts via the mobile phone app. There are certain tasks that are better left to (automated) scripting, but I find that Ylastic handles 90% of my everyday management and monitoring needs (it's especially good at providing an overview of your entire running cloud) in a simple point and click interface. As our company migrates all its infrastructure over to EC2, I can safely claim that using Ylastic has personally saved me many many days of operational drudgery and development time.

Ylastic has been a great help in organizing and managing our cloud initiative. The tools are well designed and even the little things help make managing AWS easy and pleasurable. I definitely recommend this tool to anybody running even 1 server via AWS.

I lead a team that maintains the AWS infrastructure for a major publishing house. We have servers running currently in all three regions. Tried the AWS console. It is completely unusable for team usage, and it seems too toy like for us anyway. Heard about Ylastic on the RDS forum, and signed up for it. Very,very impressed so far. We can see all our instances in all three regions along with little charts of their CPU utilization on one page. I cannot tell you how painful it was to get this kind of an overview with the amazon console. This one little feature is a huge time saver for us. Havent even gone into all the other great things they have - monitoring, alerts, scheduling, complete RDS support. We are getting majorly into RDS, so that is another big thing for us. Their pace of adding new stuff is freakin crazy. IMHO, Ylastic is the best way to manage AWS.

We've been using ylastic to manage all of our ec2 instances for a global advertising agency. It provides a great interface for managing all of our instances distributed throughout ec2. Trying to manage all of this through the command line tools or the aws console would be next to impossible. Add great customer support and some really helpful features (like aliases) and you have a winning product. I couldn't run our global footprint without ylastic. Michael Lasmanis VP Engineering, Pulpo Media

If your looking for an easy to use, full-featured solution to manage EC2, THIS IS IT! Isn't there something else you would rather be doing than running commands through a terminal? We've been using Ylastic for several months and it has made managing and securing our systems a breeze. Not enough can be said about how amazing this tool is, and THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM IS AWESOME. Every feature suggestion we have submitted has become part of the application, and within a very pleasing timeframe as well. It is because of this that we have literally not had to script a single thing to manage our EC2 instances and systems. Honestly it is almost shocking how receptive and responsive the Ylastic team has been for us. I highly recommend this product to anyone and everyone! Buy the ticket and take the ride. You will not regret it.

Ylastic is a great app for managing life in the cloud. They make it easy to launch and monitor AMI's. They are extremely responsive to issues and feature recommendations. They provide more features than ElasticFox and are much less expensive than RightScale. Their interface is intuitive and effective. Once they implement more granular security and support for recurring schedules (which is on their roadmap), they will have a 5 star rating.

I stumbled on to Ylastic after struggling with the AWS console. It has been a revelation how different two applications with similar goals can be. I absolutely love the clean user interface and the ability to look at my resources without having to constantly select things from drop downs. I manage a load balanced autoscaling EC2 setup. We just started using RDS instances too. I have been using Ylastic for the last month and have barely covered all the functionality. Alerting and monitoring for my instances lets me keep my sanity. I also love the fact that I can see both our US West and Us East resources together. The best charting I have seen for Cloudwatch. The list goes on. Amazon, are you listening?

Much faster to market than AWS' control panel for new AWS functionality. Extremely fast release cycle and constant improvement. An excellent value for the money.

We use ylastic to allow employees limited use of launching instances without the ability to delete them. This also has a great feature of remembering tags - ElasticFox does not - for volumes and adding the same tag to the corresponding snapshot. Great for maintaining EBS backups. We can also set launch parameters and schedule launches with ylastic. Another area that ElasticFox comes up short.

Ylastic is, quite simply, the UI to AWS that Amazon should have built. (Are you listening, Amazon? Save yourself a step -- buy them now!) The UI is clean, simple, and intuitive. This $25/month license has given us far better control of our $5,000/month cloud configuration. For example, we can see load and storage info for all of our RDS instances at a glance, and then drill down into detailed statistics for any RDS instance with a click. Ylastic gives us complete visibility into -- and complete control over -- every aspect of AWS that has occurred to us so far: our instances, EBS, ELB, RDS, and much more. Plus, the vendor is absurdly responsive. They deal with questions or problems in hours or sometimes minutes. For example, I found a minor bug about two hours ago; they sent me email about an hour later saying it was fixed, which it was.

I have been using Ylastic for 21 - 30 instances for the past 2 months. We like it for several reasons.. 1. Elasticfox does not save your tags across team members. We have 4 sys admins and sharting tags/aliases helps us maintain which machine is which. 2. Elasticfox does not show graphs ! We can easily hover over the instance to see what % CPU utilized, and have found several times where we needed to reboot an instance because it was hung. 3. Ylastic pages us and calls our home phones when the instance is stuck! Other calling services are quite expensive. 4. The Ylastic team is VERY responsive. If you have an idea for a feature JUST ASK! 5. Knowing if you are going over on your reserved instances is nVERY useful and can save you lots of dollars. 6. The load balancing graphic is excellent, and shows how many instances are in each zone. This helps to see if you need to rebalance. Over the past few months they have added estimates on costs which also is a great feature. I also use the service on my Iphone and it works great.

I stumbled upon ylastic after getting tired of toggling between s3fox, elasticfox, aws console, etc. It was just too many systems I had to go back and forth between. After reading ylastics features page I decided to take them up on their free week trial. I have since purchased and have been using whenever I need to do anything with my aws environment. The pros: The interface is easy to understand and use. Support is friendly and fast. Alerts on instance health as well as aws alerts can be sent to you in a Variety of ways including email, text, twitter to name a few. When an ami is deleted all files associated are deleted in s3 bucket. Tons of reporting options, i haven't had a chance to explore the possibilities here yet. The cons: Some of the sorting doesn't work correctly. Can not bundle instances. (not yet, i am told it is coming soon)

We run multiple EC2 instances behind an ELB with data driven by RDS and assets coming from S3. We have always used the console tools to manage this fairly common infrastructure. After finding Ylastic, our AWS monitoring and management has become much less complicated and we now rely less on the console tools.

We're using Ylastic for almost six months now. Very quick support and frequent updates with new features. Excellent product!

I have been using Ylastic for several months now, and it is my fav application for AWS. Tried all the other ones out there, and none of them seem to work seamlessly. Managing all the services I use, even RDS, from one place is a pleasure. Add in the alerts, zoomable cloudwatch charts, autoscaling, load balancing with a picture of my deployment, and all the other little things, I cannot imagine managing AWS without using Ylastic anymore. Everytime I have made a request for a feature, they have been very responsive. I recently posted on the RDS forum asking about iphone support for viewing RDS cloudwatch charts, and bam they released it today! Thats what I call customer support!! Way to go guys. Keep up the great work!

I've tested almost every web based AWS management there is, but noone compares to Ylastic. The web interface is clean and easy to navigate. They usually add new AWS features, such as scaling, RDS etc. within a couple of days/weeks from launch by Amazon. Whenever I've found and reported a bug, it has been fixed in a few hours. With Ylastic you don't get what you pay for, you get a lot more. And they're offering a one week free trial (just contact them).

I've been using Ylastic for a long time and couldn't be happier. They are always the first to support new features (like full-on RDB support right after the feature was released). The web interface is the best designed I've found and I get an email almost weekly detailing new features they've added. My favorite things about Ylastic is the support for aliases (no more having to write down and remember AWS IDs for volumes, instances, etc.) thoughout the application, and the awesome charts and graphs provided from AWS monitoring data. Email support is very responsive and comes from a developer. I once made a suggestion and it was included in a release just a week or two later. It's worth noting that the only negative review here is someone complaining about the lack of a free trial (e.g. he's never actually used it and is someone who can't afford a measly $25/mo).

We have been using ylastic for months now and we absolutely love it here at Bedrock.com. Ylastic has increased our productivity by huge margins. A simple feature of aliasing machines have benefited us tremendously. I cannot imagine managing an ec2 cluster without ylastic now. The support is excellent and they aways reply instantly even to a message board post. They have added lot of features in very short time. I think Amazon should just abandon their console and buy ylastic. At $25 per month, it's pretty affordable too.

We are a consulting company and have been using Ylastic for the last month or so. Before that we mostly used elasticfox, which works ok. The $25 paid for itself within a few hours in our case. Really love the simple UI and the fact that I can manage multiple services. We had a problem with our load balancing and were struggling with the command line tools. Switching to a UI that showed all the different pieces of our load balancing was great! Also get alerts now when my threshold for the balancer is triggered. Only giving them 4stars as they dont currently have blackberry support. We dont use iphone or android in our corp env. Nice product and a great timesaver!

We are an e-learning startup that is rolling out our product on AWS. We tried to use the free console from AWS, but it does not have the features we need. Finally after thrashing around with the AWS console, we switched over to Ylastic, and it has been great! We absolutely love the clean UI and the support for Auto scaling, cloud watch and load balancing. I completely disagree with the first user. We use Ylastic and love it. BTW dude, they have a free demo version too. We tried the eval before we became a customer. You should too. Their customer support has been very responsive and they also seem to be adding features very quickly.

I've been using Ylastic for 2 months now and have to disagree with the previous reviewer... Ylastic has allowed me to setup auto-scaling and load-balancing on AWS in no time at all, while their support answered any questions I had within hours (sometimes minutes) While they do have a free trial now, I switched to the paid version ($25/month is far less than what I saved using this service) on the first day. In short: Ylastic ROCKS! (And no, I'm not working for them)

I'm pretty happy using Elastifox and S3 browser. If I need a full interface there is CohesiveFT for free. Why would I pay 50 dollars to find out that Ylastic isn't much better?