Cloudkick, a Y Combinator startup, offers a free, easy server management system to businesses whose web infrastructure is maintained by Amazon’s EC2 or Slicehost cloud-based servers. Built off of Amazon Web Services’ API, Cloudkick gives users a single control panel where you can manage all of your servers (or instances) through various platforms.
Cloudkick’s dashboard allows you to easily add or remove EC2 or Slicehost servers with a click and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server. Cloudkick will check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email or voicemail, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer.
So far, Cloudkick’s virtual control center is integrated with Amazon and Slicehost only but plans to add more cloud computing platforms in the future. Currently, the startup is managing about 350 servers of 40 Y Combinator startups.
Amazon offers a web-console along with their product but you cannot add servers from other cloud platform, you can’t tag or label servers, you can’t run commands on servers from the web and EC2 doesn’t offer graphing or monitoring features. There are other cloud management services out there, like Rightscale, that offer similar services to Cloudkick. In fact, Rightscale offers a few more features in a easy to see dashboard, but the kicker is that Cloudkick is free. Rightscale’s plans run into the thousands.
Cloudkick is part of the dawn of cross-cloud applications and management tools. The application seems like a useful tool for businesses looking for an easy-to-use dashboard to control cloud-based servers. And it helps that its free. As technology companies roll out their cloud platforms, like Microsoft will be doing soon with its platform, Azure, and businesses begin to become increasingly reliant on the cloud, these management tools will become even more useful. And Cloudkick could gain good traction in this space if they integrate their application with more than just two types of platforms.
any thoughts on how they are planning to make money off this product ?
LOL, look at this guy…money…from a business…
Yeah! That too in Silicon Valley :-)
I’d be interested to see support for Rackspace’s Cloud Servers offering, which launched today and is built off Slicehost technology. With Rackspace’s purchase of Slicehost, it seems likely that most new R+D will be put into Mosso/Cloud Servers.
The Cloudkick team has built something really compelling here. We at Foodoro have been using their service for the past two months and everything just works out-of-the-box. They’ve essentially provided us with replacements for services like nagios and pingdom without having to lift a finger and all for free.
Also, since you can launch custom ec2 or slicehost instances using their service, it really saves you the overhead of configuring and setting up all the services required for any new web service.
I’m definitely looking forward to what they’ll be offering in the near future.
If I didn’t read your comment about “replacing nagios and pingdom” I would probably skip them. Definitely will check them now. I was fighting with nagios these days and something working out of the box will be great.
Same here.. Dannie’s comment made me go from “cool idea” to “I better check this out”. If they were actually making money, they should give you commission :)
RightScale offers tools that monitors your servers and deployments, and can automatically trigger alerts to automatically solve many common problems or simply to email/sms you if there is something wrong.
I wouldn’t say that either ‘replaces’ Nagios or Pingdom. They are both niche products that are geared specifically for what they do. Also it sound’s like RightScale is incorporating tools like this to work directly with cloud deployments. They recently integrated New Relic and Splunk with “more on the way.” I have already integrated the New Relic system on our site, and can attest that it worked right out of the box.
RightScale has a free offering that is really very comprehensive – create, monitor, delete operations, Amazon EC2, S3, EBS, Elastic IPs, etc, manage Amazon EC2 AMIs, create scripts to run on EC2 instances, etc. It is entirely sufficient for most startups for a few years. Their paid offerings offer a few more features, including auto-scaling to accomodate increasing or decreasing load on your EC2 instances.
I don’t see what is new or different about Cloudkick. RightScale seems to have a lot more for free…
Congrats on the launch guys! Great integration, great product, great people.
Amazon launched a Web console for EC2 about 2 months ago. I guess CloudKick started working on their system before, but it’s clearly not needed any more. Too bad…
They might integrate other service as they did for Amazon web service, only focus on one company is not a good choice.
I love this interface! They just need to add more features now.
When I provision server from Amazon and it offers a decent free AWS management console — why should I go elsewhere?
Good it offers more providers but why should have a provider and use someone else tool.
to be clear I used all this free tools and there are about 20 out there .. they all do the same thing.. one plus with AWS the server starts fast! and also you kill a server fast! no freak’n waiting..
Good luck — this is yet another Techcrunch/Y Combinator startup propaganda!
the interface is great and with more features and more API’s added from other providers this could be a central point for many nodes.
This does look similar to the Amazon tools already there. Rightscale has a key difference that no one seems to be matching. You don’t just spawn an instance, it lets you actually script the start up process to install software, configure services, load site and database data from repositories or S3, and fire it all up. Most of these types of services are just monitoring of already configured servers which means changes still require you to rebuild and re-set your instances for future use. Its good to see more competition, but I would like to see more tools like Rightscale has. More competition can mean more competitive pricing for we the consumers.
Great, thanks for the announce
Seems lame for EC2 so far. Not enough features to do anything other than start a Ubuntu instance with default parameters.
This looked good on first glance, but doesn’t seem very compelling at all once you get into it. All you can monitor is ssh, http and https, and the system just uses the bog standard Nagios alert format. The graphs sounded interesting, but none of my EC2 instances have any graph data even after 3 days, and Cloudkick isn’t responding to any of my questions. This one gets a “could do better” verdict …
in addition to cloudkick I will suggest using third-party monitoring service http://www.monitis.com, for monitoring your EC2 instances
Better server monitoring than ServerDensity is http://www.bijk.com – it’s completly free.