A new App has been made available an Apple’s desktop App Store: Nephorider has launched its cloud visualization tool in order to help developers manage, visualize & analyze their cloud infrastructure in a more intelligent way. Currently compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) – though co-founder Laurent Cerveau says the product will quickly be cross-platform.
Cerveau, who was the former CTO of Plizy, a startup launched by Deezer co-founder Jonathan Benassaya, which has since pivoted into Streamnation, also counts Apple’s Cupertino Headquarters as one of his former office spaces. Cerveau worked for Apple for nearly 10 years, working on everything of OSX & OS9, to developing iCal & iSync, features still critical to Apple’s ecosystem today.
Nephorider’s goal comes from a personal experience of Cerveau, who, during his time as CTO at Plizy, found himself regularly asking his team for an information on their cloud infrastructure, whether it be a break down of costs to show investors, to manage spending, or just to understand what machines are being used to do what.
AWS has been known to be cheap & flexible, but it can be a pain in the ass to use. Their bare bones interface has seen some improvements in recent years, but Amazon is more about making the tools available than making them easy to use – Cerveau says that several Amazon employees have been impressed with Nephorider.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVkVxG5SOFE
For startups growing fast, it’s easy to lose track of which machines are being used/unused, the allocation of resources to prod and pre-prod machines, as well as to keep track of what your stack is made up of. Nephorider uses an built-in AWS tagging system on its machines to allow uses to drag-and-drop identify which machines are built on what language, information which is then synced up to AWS (so you can see it from AWS directly if you ever decide to stop using Nephorider).
For now, there don’t seem to be many products out there like this, and given that the top Cloud Computing companies are worth a combined $100 Billion, I think startups building services on top of the cloud are only going to grow in the coming years.
Disclosure: I formerly worked for Plizy during the time when Laurent Cerveau was CTO. This in no way influenced my decision to write about them – their product, however, had a big impact on my decision.
You can download the desktop app from Mac App Store here or check out Nephorider.com for more details