What Are Good, Advanced Tools For Managing EC2? [closed]

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

You can set up a Rundeck (Java Jetty) instance with a public IP for the web UI and add the rundeck server's public key to your EC2 nodes under whatever user account you want to execute tasks as for centralized management and orchestration. Once you have populated your logical environments with your server lists, user accounts or LDAP/AD authentication, and assigned permissions for users you will be free to execute commands on any number of nodes simultaneously or via regex match and create repeatable jobs from them.

The Python boto SDK is also very useful for performing all things EC2 and creating automations against their APIs.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

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

Answer 5

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 6

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

http://www.iawsmanager.com