Skeddly

Avantages

I've used Skeddly for years, in 4 companies so far, whenever I've used AWS. It makes best practices easy to implement, including backups, disaster recovery, and cost control. The feature list seems to expand every few months, so the value keeps expanding without programming or effort on my part.

The price is great -- no minimums, and very reasonable per-transaction billing.

When scheduled tasks are run, notifications can be emailed on success or failure. I also appreciate the way that logs are maintained inside Skeddly, so I don't have to manage their preservation and access.

While I could program these scheduled tasks myself, I much prefer having a tool that is developed and run independently. It's more reliable; and Skeddly's UI and documentation makes it much easier to delegate responsibility for it, compared to my own programs.

Inconvénients

I haven't had any problems with Skeddly in my companies, but I can understand if other companies would prefer to keep these functions in-house. Skeddly is given a role in my AWS account which allows it to do its tasks, and this means that can get information about how my systems are organized. In addition, the log files that it preserves also reveal information about our configurations. It's obviously just a subset of what AWS already knows; but some companies could find it problematic.

Avantages

I think it has a greate value for money, since the free tier is enough for me. It was also pretty easy to setup my use case.

Inconvénients

I cannot think of anything that I didn't like when I setup my account or use case. Maybe the request for providing a credit card and not being entirely sure whether I would be charged after a month or not (in my opinion this was not very clear on the terms of use).

Avantages

Automating jobs in AWS is made easy with this tool.

Inconvénients

Nothing. Never have any issues with it. Love it!

Avantages

Allows me to automate snapshots of my AWS environment. Because snapshots store data in different data centers, I now have a disaster recovery solution. When I did this with Windows servers and physical locations it could cost 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars, and it was complex and difficult to test. I get a bill from Skeddly for less than a dollar per month and I feel VERY confident that my critical IT systems are protected.

Inconvénients

The interface could use some help, it is a LOT better than when I first started using it some years ago, but I still get confused. I don't log into it often, so it takes a few minutes to get the hang of it, and then I'm off and running.

Avantages

Skeddly is so wonderful and works so perfectly, I just do not need to access the web interface. Once you set it to perform the tasks of starting, stopping, making and erasing snapshots it will work so perfectly that you will have quiet days and nights :)

Inconvénients

Now, just implement support for Google Cloud. This is not a negative point, but it would be interesting for the future.

Avantages

The interface is very easy to navigate and understand. The pricing is very reasonable. And the system is reliable...I get an email every day with a status.

Inconvénients

I don't have any cons. I've been using Skeddly for over 7 years to automate backups. I use it on dozens of servers and have never had an issue.

Avantages

That it automates that backup process of EC2 servers with just the right number of options.
The price is affordable to small businesses like mine. Please keep it that way!

Inconvénients

Nothing. I can't faulty it. Please keep up the good work!

Avantages

Easy to use, great control over amazon instances, backups and copies and above all, non-expensive at all.

Inconvénients

Not in Spanish, need to have local currencies, and presences in other countries, at least have some partnerships in LaTam.

Avantages

Easy setup and never failed to do the job. We are using Skeddly service to handle our aws server.

Inconvénients

So far I have Nothing, it is working fine I can't remember anything to negative to say the Skeddly.

Avantages

I love that I have been able to fully automate all of my AMI and snapshot creation for backup and replication. Skeddly makes it easy for me to take snaps of all my important data and ship it to multiple regions. At the same time the cleanup tasks are great and help keep snapshot and storage costs down because we don't have to think about it and we only keep the data we want. I have reached out to support on several occasions with questions and feel like my requests have been resolved on the first contact. The pricing is also great since you only pay per action.

Inconvénients

Early on I made some poor choices in how I was tagging resources created by Skeddly and forgot several of my cleanup jobs were in test mode this lead to a few months of excessive charges for snapshot storage. A notification that a job was running, but in test mode for more than a week or something would be great. In the end the fault was my own and even though I tagged some resources poorly initially I was still able to clean it all up with Skeddly once I realized my error

Avantages

Skeddly is very simple to use, it is very quick to set up automated actions and this allows you to feel free not having to worry about writing any scripts. Email notifications are great to know that things are going well.

Inconvénients

The only issue I have had is when I create a new volume from a snapshot in AWS and delete my old one, I'll have to modify one of my Skeddly actions to match the new volume ID, however this makes sense.

Avantages

Large number of actions available to cover all of the possible scheduling options you could imagine within the AWS platform.
Setup is easy, and secure.
Support is fast and always knowledgeable.
Price is on a per action model, so no surprises, and no licensing tie-in.
Feature requests are met quickly, as are new features when a new offering is released by AWS.

Inconvénients

The ability to have one action kick off another based upon a success or failure.

Avantages

Automating backups on Amazon Web Services is normally a clunky experiences as it requires setting up a server, scripting, cron jobs, and knowing the volume ID's. With Skeddly, I login to an easy to use interface and customize backups using their friendly names. Not only that, email notifications are available for successful and failed backups, giving me peace of mind.

It also automatically backs up my 15+ Route53 DNS zones, containing hundreds of records. This has saved me in the past when I had to compare our current config to one from several months back to troubleshoot a DNS issue.

The pricing model is worth mentioning as well. Super affordable and you only pay for what you use.

Inconvénients

It's kind of pain that everything is in Canadian dollar instead of USD, which is really only a minor annoyance.

Avantages

Writing maintenance scripts is probably one of my least favorite jobs, so I love products that are the best in the world at doing the things that I shouldn't be. Now every time someone asks me to help them reduce their AWS costs, add snapshots, automate instance start ups and shut downs, etc I show them how they can do it themselves with Skeddly.

Avantages

It is exceedingly easy to use, and the reliability is outstanding. There is a wide breadth of services to choose to automate. My only regret is it is set it and forget...I like playing in Skeddly and doing new things. The pricing for the tool is reasonable and transaction based leaving the control of the budget in our hands which is so appreciated.

Inconvénients

There is little to dislike; works well on mobile and feature requests are promptly handled. Quite amazing, really.

Avantages

We have used to automate the creation EC2 snapshots for 6/7 years now, it have NEVER let us down and as a result we have never let our customers down.

Inconvénients

Pricing confusion. The month on month price has gradually crept up and up over the years with no change to our service - March to April was a $6 increase despite being a day less usage. We've not had any price changes conveyed to us that I am aware.

Avantages

Easy to setup automating AWS EC2 server snapshots and culling the old snapshots. I also use it to start and stop EC2 servers on a schedule. There are a lot more options for automation, but those are the ones I needed immediately.

Inconvénients

User interface is good, but it could provide more dynamic support. Several times I setup automation and forgot to set the region - more prompting or highlighting potential issues or better - 'This is what will happen' support with some automation validation (e.g. checking that EC2 Server IDs are correct).

Avantages

Skeddly is super easy to use, it's very intuitive; you can be up and running quickly and it just works. In 2+years we've never had an issue. The support is excellent, you don't get bogged down in 1st level support operators, you get answers right away.

Inconvénients

Nothing to add here, we haven't come across any real detriments..

Avantages

Saving money and never happened any outages or problems with the execution of my jobs. Prices are good, specially because they are in Canadian Dollars, cheapest in Brazil.

Inconvénients

- Interface could be more graphical and easy to use, built with buttons, panels, etc.
- Suggestions to change names of AMI`s and avoid them repeat names too. Once I was generating AMI's with the same name, one killing other and I was thinking we had more backups in different times. In this case, I've put the "date and time" in the name at the end.

Avantages

So easy to define actions once you have linked it to your AWS account, and having multiple users for a Skeddly account is a great help too.

Inconvénients

I would like to be able to one user identity which could access each of my client's Skeddly accounts, similar to the functionality in AWS which allows cross-account access.

Avantages

I used Skeddly at my last company as well as my current company. It's simple interface and functionality help IT sleep at night, knowing Skeddly is always working for us.

It's cheap!

Inconvénients

One feature request is for Skeddly to look at our AMIs/Volumes/Snapshots, then to compare that to the AMIs running as EC2, and recommend deleting ones that are not used.

Avantages

It is very simple to setup start of AWS EC2 instances as long as RDS snapshots.
It works smoothly and reliably.

Inconvénients

Setting up future dates where we don't want instances to start (holidays, ...) was not possible.
It was added on 20th july after multiple requests.

Avantages

It's easy to use and configure all my shedules.

Inconvénients

If you filter tasks on tags, you need to make you selection again after changing a task. It would be easier that it remembers the selection.

Avantages

It's easy to use and has really useful features.

Inconvénients

It can be expensive if not planned correctly.

Avantages

It's easy of use. You can manage a lot of AWS tasks without writing one line of code. For example we switch off a lot of servers during the night. This saves us a lot of money.

Inconvénients

It would be good to be able to group tasks. For example backup tasks, scaling tasks etc. Now we have a log lost and solve this using a naming convention.