Automated data backups and cost management Simplification of system operations Quick results, compared to doing it in-house

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.

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.

Makes my life easier

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.

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

Costs reduction from not running a amazon instance 24/7.

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.

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).

I have an actual disaster recovery plan at a very low cost, hugely beneficial.

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.

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.

Automated backups of my EC2 instances and Route53 Zones. This is a lifesaver and a must-have if you have critical data in the cloud.

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.

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