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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

OpenCost – Open Source Cost Monitoring for Cloud Environments

Some time ago, I recommended Vantage as a unified AWS cost tracking tool. As an - also cloud vendor-neutral - cost monitoring tool, with OpenCost there now is an open source solution for this use case as well. Instead of relying on a third-party service, OpenCost allows you to run your own cost monitoring service in your Kubernetes cluster, which might be a useful alternative, especially for enterprise environments where Kubernetes experience and DevOps resources are often readily available. Read more

Vantage – A Unified AWS Console

In last week's blog post I casually mentioned that out-of-the-box with AWS there's no single unified console providing you with an overview of your deployed infrastructure. Thankfully, there's Vantage - a centralized dashboard that provides you with such an overview and cost transparency across AWS regions and accounts through views, global search, and actionable insights. Up to $500 in monthly AWS spend Vantage is free. Beyond that there are Pro and Business plans at a monthly price of $50 and $250, respectively. Read more

CloudMapper: An AWS Visualisation Tool

CloudMapper is an AWS visualisation tool that's highly useful for getting an overview of your AWS infrastructure and network setup. Depending on the number of services, instances, VPCs, and subnets used, getting lost is quite easy, especially when considering that out-of-the-box with AWS there's no single unified console from which to get an overview of your deployed resources but rather a multitude of consoles, one for each AWS service. Therefore, keeping track of your infrastructure and keeping your costs in check can be ... Read more