Vantage, a new service that simplifies the management of AWS resources and associated spending, is sneaking out. The service offers its users an alternative to the complex AWS console with support for most standard AWS services, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, ECS and Fargate, and Route 53 hosted zones.
Company founder Ben Schaechter previously worked at AWS and Digital Ocean (and before that he also worked on Crunchbase). Yet while DigitalOcean showed him how to create a development experience for individuals and small businesses, argues that the underlying services and hardware simply weren't as robust as hyperclouds. AWS, on the other hand, offers everything a developer could want (and probably more), but the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.
"The idea really came from 'and if we could take the DigitalOcean user experience and apply it to the three public cloud providers, AWS, GCP and Azure, "Schaechter told me." We decided to just start with AWS because the experience is the most difficult and it's the biggest player on the market. And I really think we can deliver a lot of value before doing GCP and Azure. "
The focus for Vantage is on the developer's experience and cost transparency. Schaechter noted that some of its users describe it as similar to a "Mint for AWS". To get started, give Vantage a set of read permissions for your AWS services and the tool will automatically profile everything in your account. The service updates this list once an hour, but users can also manually update their lists.
Since it's often quite difficult to know which AWS services you're actually using, this alone is a useful feature. "This is use case number one," he said. "What are we paying for and what do we have?"
At the heart of Vantage is what the team calls "views," which lets you see what assets you're using. What's interesting here is that it is a fairly flexible system and allows you to create custom views to see what resources you are using for a particular application in different regions, for example. These can include Lambda, storage buckets, subnet, code pipeline, and more.
When it comes to cost tracking, Vantage currently only offers point-in-time costs, but Schaechter tells me the team plans to add historical trends as well to give users a better view of their cloud spend.
Schaechter and his co-founder started the company and noticed that before he wants to raise money for the service, he wants to see the people who pay for it. Currently, Vantage offers a free plan as well as paid "pro" and "business" plans with additional features.