On Startup Newvem’s CloudRadar: Amazon Cloud Usage Data

Israeli startup Newvem plans to place cloud usage data at its customers’ disposal, and with the lack of raw data on cloud utilization out there — in this case it’s Amazon Web Services — Talkin’ Cloud is happy to take a look.

The Newvem cloud analysis service, which is still in beta, analyzed the AWS EC2 usage patterns of 160 firms over a seven-day period in April 2012. Of the 160 users, 70 were defined as “light,” or eight or fewer instances; 60 were “medium,” or nine to 35 instances, and 30 were “heavy” EC2 users, or more than 35 instances. The company plans to publish its result in a biweekly CloudRadar report, so it says customers can profit from the insights and information.

Some of that information might surprise you. First of all, security: Across the board, EC2 users seemed to be unaware of the security risks of their actions. Fifty-four percent of light users had a database IP open to the Internet; the figure is 50 percent for medium users and 52 percent for heavy users. Newvem attributes these percentages — highly consistent across the board — to a lack of experience regarding configurations and what’s going on behind the scenes.

Next, Newvem analyzed how efficient the EC2 users were. Specifically, what percent of users had more than 50 percent running idle instances. An AWS customer would want this figure to be on the low side, and the light users did not fare so well. Despite having a smaller footprint, 55 percent of light users had more than 50 percent idle instances. Forty-one percent of medium users fell into this category, and only 29 percent of heavy users showed that level of inefficiency.

But light users bounce back when it comes to top efficiency — 39 percent of light users had fewer than 10 percent of instances running idle during the seven-day review period, presenting an interesting “feast or famine” dichotomy for that segment. Heavy users came in second place at 26 percent, and medium users last at 19 percent with less than 10 percent of instances running idle over the seven days.

With heavy users scoring first and second in the two efficiency categories, Newvem argues that larger cloud users have “been able to successfully align their cloud consumption” to growth and can “afford skilled resources.”

Finally, regarding Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) usage, a full 29 percent of 50 users over the seven days ran their services in a single Availability Zone. While users may be aware of ELB, they are not taking the opportunity to load in multiple zones, which mitigates the risk of a service level drop in a single availability zone. Again, Newvem points out the lack if AWS user awareness, since loading in multiple zones is simple task while configuring ELB.

Talkin’ Cloud readers can click here to visit Newvem’s internet site and learn more about their services.