Reader’s Letters: What’s with GorillaStack?

As we continue to acquire new customers and more potential customers, we’re answering plenty of questions that often aren’t covered by the GorillaStack FAQ.

It occurred to me the other day that, as well as updating our FAQ, it might make sense to publish some of the excerpts of recent conversations to give curious customers a truer sense of how GorillaStack works and some of the things you need to know before jumping onto our AWS Cost Optimization Platform.

1. I’m trying to see how GorillaStack works, what logic it uses and how i can configure it?

This one fairly simple to answer, if you use the help bar in the bottom left of the app you’ll find a handy short explanation for how each product works. In terms of logic, most users find that it helps them to have a play around with the product in a free trial. Essentially customers can set their own logic by timing, tag, auto scaling group, location, timezone and some other metrics.

If you want a quick heads-up before you dive in, here are is a quick summary of what each product does with some shortcuts to the help articles:

• Dashboard: Monitor costs from multiple accounts from one screen
• \Alerts: Keep on top of your spend with rich AWS Billing Alerts via SMS, Slack, HipChat or Slack.
• Power Cycle: Save money and resource by turning off EC2 instances when they’re not in use.
• Insights: (coming soon) Get detailed personalized recommendations for creating efficiencies in your stack by rightsizing and improving elasticity.
• Power Scale: Sophisticated controls for Scheduled Auto Scaling.

Additionally for Power Scale, you can read a good synopsis at our blog post about Power Scale and its enhanced scheduled auto scaling.

2. What info does my sysadmin needs to know so they don’t freak out when new instances spin up?

They probably just need to know that you are using GorillaStack to automate efficiencies in your cloud setup. The best way to do this is by using our Slack or HipChat notifications which will tell your SysAdmin when these configurations occur, or even just our SMS / Email service which does the same thing. One of the many benefits is that you can even set how much notice you get in advance, and can snooze or cancel the configuration.

3. If there are issues with a server within the cluster, what info do they have or need in order to apply changes across all of those that have been spun up?

GorillaStack just needs to know the tags of the instances that you wish to apply changes to, its that simple!

4. What shouldn’t a sysadmin touch if I’m using your product?

A sysadmin probably shouldn’t cycle or scale from within the AWS CLI / Console if you’re using GorillaStack. It won’t break anything but it will make some of your configurations a little more complicate to manage. Besides, GorillaStack is generally more flexible and easier to use than the AWS tools in the same domain.

5. What are some success stories?

We have a number of clients (some quite high profile) who are seeing double digit % savings month on month. We will be putting out their case studies shortly when we have their testimonials lined up.

6. What upcoming features do you have planned?

There are a number of cool features coming soon – the next one will be Insights which will examine your environment and make informed rightsizing recommendations as well as giving you powerful data to help you improve your elasticity. If you have any suggestions or requests you should get in contact.

7. How do we calculate the ROI vs the normal spike allowance on AWS servers?

We have a couple of ways of determining this, but it makes sense to run for a period of time and the compare to the previous period. Obviously there will be other influences, but it should be pretty clear. We find our 30 day free trial gives most of our users enough time to see the value that we provide. We’re pretty confident in our ROI.