Second entry in the series: Amazon Web Services: an introduction

Amazon provides some tools to interact with its Web Services, and many others exist provided by 3rd parties. Here is my selection

S3 tools

JetS3t

JetS3t is a free, open-source Java toolkit and application suite for the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The toolkit provides Java programmers with a powerful yet simple API for interacting with S3 and managing data stored there, while the applications allow anyone to easily manage and interact with their S3 accounts.

JetS3t is composed by a java library to access S3, a command line tool to synchronize local folders to S3 (s3sync) and a GUI to upload/download files (cockpit)

EC2 tools

ElasticFox

A graphical interface to Amazon EC2 web service as a Firefox addOn, provided by Amazon

You can do pretty much everything with it, register instances, start/stop them, manage access keys, security groups, elastic ips,
EBS volumes,…

Amazon Management Console

A web based interface to Amazon EC2 launched recently by Amazon. Same functionality as ElasticFox

Amazon EC2 API tools

The command line version, you won’t need it if using ElasticFox, unless the command line is your thing

Amazon EC2 AMI tools

The Amazon EC2 AMI Tools are command-line utilities to help bundle an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), create an AMI from an existing machine or installed volume, and upload a bundled AMI to Amazon S3.

Even using ElasticFox you’ll need it in your running instances to create new images from them (only for *nix, Windows images are bundled from Elasticfox or other GUI)

EC2 services

Morph

Morph AppSpace allows you to run webapps with no effort. You provide them with a war (for Java) or your Rails, Grails or PHP app and they’ll run it for you in the cloud, with a DB (postgres or mysql) with warm backups, a webserver, continuosly monitored and a two machine cluster for load balancing and high availability, all from 1$ a day. There’s a development version to try it for free.

How it works for Java apps? You just need to access your database connection pool using JNDI. They will provide you the resource name to use.

Morph AppCloud is another product that adds more flexibility, providing a web based cluster editor where you can design your cloud just by dragging and connecting the modules provided (ie. Jetty web server, mysql master, mysql slave, load balancer,…), then just click to run it.

Disclaimer: I know the guys behind Morph and have done some work for them

Rightscale

It’s a lower level service where you can interact with all the EC2 operations. You can create images, start/stop them, health montirs,… all through their web interface. You have a developer edition to try it for free

CohesiveFT

It’s more of a provisioning system where you select components and create an image (Elastic Server) to run it in EC2, VMware, and other virtualization frameworks, and with a management web interface to start/stop the components, monitor the services running,…

They have a list of components and templates, mostly open source projects, and you can add your own too.