Amazon released a web based tool, in addition to their ElasticFox Firefox plugin, that allows AWS EC2 Management.  Other consoles will be added soon.

I have been saying for some time that cloud based offerings with great tools will win out.  Making it simple to setup and manage cloud tools, with tools and hopefully APIs to the tools so that these can be aggreated, will win over hosting clients and be a value add for the cloud providers of today Google App Engine, Amazon AWS, Mosso, Joyent, SliceHost etc.

Today we’re announcing the availability of the Web-based AWS Management Console, which in this first release provides management of your Amazon EC2 environment via a point-and-click interface. A number of management tools already exist: for example a popular Firefox extension known as Elasticfox; however as you read more of this post I believe you’ll agree that the new console is compelling–especially when it’s time to log in as a new AWS developer.

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta, it is about time some of these services actually launched.  It is hard to convince people to use the cloud layer without being out of beta (AppEngine when’s it gonna happen huh?).

Amazon also launches with windows support, SQL Server support and much more.  This is great news in times where budgets are tight and people want to start scalable businesses but want to only pay for what is used.  The cloud layer will be a very attractive option to many.

Learn more about the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. There are already lots of great simple toos like ElasticFox (Firefox EC2 Extension) to help manage your AMIs from a browser.  You can start and stop armies of configured servers from a little extension in your browser.

Developers are getting many tools to build great things.  We hope more products are out of beta soon like AppEngine.

AppEngine is getting an update to it’s next available language besides Python (my particular favorite) in Java.  Apparently the top candidates were C++, Java and C# support for AppEngine but Java has been added due to the overwhelming library and developer support.

Microsoft also has been playing with entering the cloud with Mesh and now with “Strata”.  This would be a cloud for .NET developers.

There are already cloud providers for .NET mainly in Mosso’s offerings of any language being cloud enabled. But one from Microsoft will probably draw all the .NET developers to it like most Microsoft offerings.

Also, Amazon EC2 recently announced support for MS SQL Server and Windows servers.  So really any platform can also be used in Amazon EC2 in Amazon Machine Images. This took longer to happen due to the licensing per processor and server that most Microsoft software has.

This won’t be changing things much for me in the near term but having more platforms available in the cloud and on cloud systems is the natural progression.  At some point a platform might have advantages in cheaper processing but for now Python with AppEngine is still the best bet.

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.

• Download ElasticFox
• Amazon post about ElasticFox

Amazon EC2 lapped up again and added EC2 persistent storage. Previously you had to store data in SimpleDB or S3 because your EC2 instances could go away at any time due to scale down and up. This is much like how on Google App Engine you need to store everything in the BigTable Datastore, because there is really no such thing as a physical location in a cloud that is elastic. But Amazon has one upped by adding persistant storage in EC2.

If you are a developer and not excited about the ability to make applications with no worry of scale or support in infrastructure, I am just not sure if you are a developer or more worried about change. I always have these ideas that end up being based on the fast that I would need at least 3-5 servers to pull off. Unfortunately when you are smaller or just trying out an idea you dont’ want to buy infrastructure for the most extreme case (large traffic spike) and then have servers sitting at 1% utilization the rest of the time. With cloud computing and service storage, this whole problem is abstracted away. Many times this is at a much reduced cost, you are only paying for minimal usage, not what your maximum usage would be.

One big element to the cloud computing rage is also that dynamic languages will win out. If you will note in all the new cloud technologies there is a recurring theme of BigTable/MapReduce datastores (eliminiating much of relational database ways), dynamic languages (removing static typing and adding flexibility for rapid deployment and development) and the developer has alot of freedom and power to innovate.

Consider cloud computing the point at which dynamic languages such as Python (maybe Jython, IronPython, etc), Ruby, and higher order parallel languages like Erlang won out. Google App Engine uses Python, SimpleDB from Amazon is built with Erlang, etc. These languages like Python and Ruby which are slower (Ruby is much much slower than Python, Python can hang with static compiled languages) but the scalability, ActiveRecord like BigTable architecture, and rapid prototyping ORMs which were previously seen as too performance intensive or slow could become moot with the power of Amazon or Google’s infrastructure.

It is just a real interesting time in technology, it a major leap, it should be recognized. If you are a developer or infrastructure specialist, you should be diving in.