What Are Good, Advanced Tools For Managing EC2?

Question

I'm looking to manage a system (or preferably multiple systems) of machines on EC2, and at present the only way I can see doing that in a reasonable way is to extend the Typica library and build a control panel that launches, configures, and checks in on machines for me.

I don't expect there to be any prefabricated solutions to exactly my problem out there, but I'm wondering if there are any good tools for managing EC2 instances out there? Preferably in Java, but it'll more than likely be easier to learn a new language than to implement a seriously powerful control panel.

And yes, I know about Elasticfox - it's a wonderful tool, but not nearly powerful enough for what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

AWS Toolkit for Eclipse should prolly work for your needs. It is Java oriented.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=250

Answer 2

Have a look at Rightscale's tools as well; their premium tools are for-money, but their free tools are fairly comprehensive too.

Answer 3

In addition, there's Cloud42, but while all of these tools, along with Amazon's new official Java API interface are quite nice, none of them (except Rightscale, which is awesome, but very incompatible with what I'm doing, sadly) have any sort of functionality remotely close to properly managing an application launch on the cloud.

I suspect that Nimbus and OpenNebula are actually tools closer to what I was asking about - proper automated system management, rather than just access for manual machine management, however I have not had a proper chance to investigate either of these.

For my purposes we developed our own in house tool using the Typica library and several other tools, that allowed us to give machines abstract names and launch, configure, and issue commands to them via their names rather than instance id's or private dns's. Might be released open source, but that's not my decision unfortunately. I'll update this if it is.

Answer 4

Checkout the new iPhone application ( iAWSManager ) to manage your AWS resources from your iPhone .

http://www.iawsmanager.com

Answer 5

It seemed you want to do several distinct tasks: 1) Launch and check-in on EC2 instances - seems to be the domain of the AWS cloudwatch and autoscale services. Maybe you can say how & why those do not fit your needs? You might look at Ylastic too though they probably won't work for the same reasons that RightScale won't - but you don't say what those reasons are...

2) You mention Nimbus and OpenNebula, but I think Eucalyptus (http://open.eucalyptus.com/) is what you are after? I found the "Grid" founded projects tended to miss the mark quite badly.

3) For configuration of the machines I think you'll want to look at [Chef][2] and Puppet. You'll want to ask a separate question about (resource ordering) differences between these two.