VT’s Tech Blog

Just got an email from Amazon with their announcement of the beta release of the AWS Management Console. This helps users manage their EC2 resources though an easy to use web interface. No more third party browser addons and custom code to check the status of EC2 instances and playing around with Elastic IPs and EBS. I’m sure everyone’s been waiting a long time for this move from Amazon.

Their new interface is quite a help in getting the regular chores done and taking a look at the current activities on EC2. Here’s how the screen looks when you log in (click on the image for a larger version):

Looks like I’ll be using ElasticFox less after getting used to this clean interface. Here’s what you can do with this version of the console:

• AMI Management: browse and search AMIs, launch instances from AMIs, deregister and register AMIs
• Instance Management: launch, reboot, terminate, get console output, RDP/SSH help, etc.
• Security Group Management: create and delete security groups, add and remove permissions, configure firewall settings, open and close ports
• Elastic IP Management: create and release IP Addresses, associate IPs to instances
• Elastic Block Store: create, delete, attach and detach volumes. Take snapshots and manage snapshots.
• Key Pair management: create and delete public/private key pairs.

Though this initial version does provide all the basic interfaces for managing EC2, Amazon’s got a lot planned out for the AWS Management Console. Here’s what’s coming up in the future:

• Tagging – Label and group Amazon EC2 resources with your own custom metadata to make it easier to identify and manage your instances, volumes, and other EC2 resources.
• Monitoring, Load Balancing and Auto-scaling – View real-time monitoring of operational metrics within Amazon EC2, configure load balancing and auto-scaling rules through a web-based UI.
• Amazon S3 Support – Create and delete Amazon S3 buckets, upload and download objects through your browser, edit permissions, set log data, and manage URLs.
• Amazon SimpleDB Support – Construct SimpleDB queries through a point-and-click query expression builder and explore your data through a graphical dataset viewer.
• Amazon SQS Support – Manage your SQS queues, add and retrieve messages from you queues, test and build your applications with help from the AWS Management Console.
• CloudFront Support – Setup and administer content delivery distributions on Amazon CloudFront using a simple web-based tool on the AWS Management Console.

Links:

AWS Console
Amazon Web Services Blog: Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console

Cloud Computing
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s an interesting Article I came across today which goes through the basics of setting up Scalr.  Scalr is  is an open source, fully redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling hosting environment that uses Amazon EC2

This article discusses the implementation of Scalr. Scalr allows network administrators to create virtual server farms, using prebuilt components. Scalr uses four Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) for load balancing, databases, application server, and a generic base image. Administrators can preconfigure one machine and, when the load warrants, bring online additional machines with the same image, to handle the increased requests.

By using Scalr, you can create a server farm that uses prebuilt AMIs for load balancing, web servers, and databases. You also can customize a generic AMI, which you can use to host your actual application.

Scalr monitors the health of the entire server farm, ensuring that instances stay running and that load averages stay below a configurable threshold. If an instance crashes, another one of the proper type will be launched and added to the load balancer.

Link to Article: Auto-Scaling Web Sites Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr