Elastic Fox - Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2
Sunday, May 4th, 2008ElasticFox 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.
