Elastic Fox – Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2
ElasticFox is a pretty nice tool for managing EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) AMI instances AMIs (Amazon Machine Instances) from preconfigured AKIs (Amazon Kernel Image) or ARIs (Amazon Ramdisk Instances). For instance they have a AMI for fedora core 4 that is loaded with mysql and apache form amazon to get started quickly. Ultimately you end up making your own AMIs with the stuff you run on but these can get you started quickly.
It looks like this, it is built in XUL but could easily be built in AJAX or Flash or even Silverlight using APIs.
Figure 1: Shows the AMIs and your installed AMI instances.
Figure 2: Shows Available Preconfigured instances from Amazon and Others
Pretty nice little GUI to the EC2 service to help people ease into setting up and playing with cloud computing. For people running on the cloud already this is nice to have a quick web developer tool for testing, and quickly changing the dynamics of your resources with in your browser.
I think the cloud will be victorious sooner rather than later if there are great tools to beat out traditional hosting. Finally making tools that aren’t locked to a hosting company with bad applications. At least it makes this area more competitive.
This is what makes Amazon’s model so attractive. Even though it is pieces and components, services will be built on it with great interfaces, probably much better ones than can be designed by the cloud provider themselves via great apis and componentization of cloud infrastructure.
Tags: amazon, aws, cloud, ec2, elastic cloud, elasticfox, firefox, interface, tools, xul
[...] abandoned for now using Elastic Fox, my brain needs to wrap around how the back end really works before I can start using a [...]
[...] Johnston-Watt, Enigmatec CTO, performed a canned demo (using Elastic Fox), showing how the cloud might be used for disaster recovery. Apart from his very correct use of the [...]
I really like elasticfox, it really takes some of the pain out of managing the virtual machines. But I have a few options I really would like to see added on that I really think would take the last bit of stress out of the equation, and really take the computing could to the next level.
For the windows users using the ec2 tools is a P.I.T.A. (pain in the ass), and I would like to see the bundle tasks area made more user friendly and well…useful. Being able to select and image, and click a button AND label it would be awesome. This would add a more snapshot like feature to the cloud, for those of us who are using the virtual machines in a more long term basis. And being able to add some tags that are not browser specific, so that if we have multiple ops guys they could see who’s machines are whose.
@Greg – yeh the aws.amazon.com management console for EC2 and now MapReduce isn’t bad. I have been using it for most tasks now but elasticfox greatly influenced it. But I agree, the apis are pretty open to build great tools on it so maybe that will happen more and more.
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/01/manage-amazon-ec2-with-new-webbased-console.html
I hope you would not mind if I posted a part of this on my univeristy blog?
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